Right after Roger told me about the free pavers, he asked me "what can we do with them?" At that time, I really didn't know how we would use the pavers and I really didn't have time to think about it, either. Part of the deal was that we needed to get the pavers off site before the demo crew brought their dump truck back to fill with all the debris and that included the pavers.
Stacking pavers is very boring so I had a lot of time to think about what we could do with all those pavers. The pavers are various shades of brown so I don't want to use them close to the house. We want an exposed aggregate concrete patio to match the existing sidewalks and the house is grey. Then it hit me like a ton of pavers. We could build a large round patio under the large willow tree. That area is very shaded and cool in the summer.
The brown of the pavers will match the dirt in that area because we will not have grass due to the shade. But will have hostas and ferns because of the shade. Plus, I didn't buy any hostas this year and I am jonesing to buy hostas. Lots of hostas....sorry I can't help myself.
The ground under the willow is slightly sloped so I estimate 1 layer of retaining block buried and then transitioning into 2 layers on the low side. When we broke apart the swimming pool we kept the wide concrete bull nose coping pieces. They are 12 inches by 24 wide and have a bull nose on one side. They are weathered because they are from the 1930's but I like the non new look. We will need to rent a concrete saw to cut angles so we can form a 18 edged circle using rectangular pieces.
The bull nose concrete pieces are very close to the same thickness as the pavers so I think that our only costs will be sand, crushed stone, renting the saw, and polymeric sand. It would be great to keep costs as low as possible because we want a pool but that can't happen until we finish the back of the house.
I did some very rough drawings and the patio will be at least 12 feet in diameter. We have a square gas fire pit and 2 heavy handcrafted wrought iron tables, that I purchased at auction on the cheap. The tables have wood tops but I want to cast concrete tops for them and a concrete top for the square gas fire pit. That will repeat the patio bull nose coping pieces.
What will we use for seating? We love Adirondack chairs but not the plastic ones nor the wood ones. We want to be able to leave the tables and chairs outside year round. We already have enough 'stuff' to store every year. So we are going to deconstruct our wood ones and trace the pieces onto solid PVC boards. This will be pricey and but they will be heavy and not blow over in a storm. Build them once and they should last a long time and only require periodic scrubbing.
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Gratuitous kitty photos.
So that's the plan.
And as always...
Reuse Repurpose Recycle
