Bear in mind that there are many kinds of "outdoor rooms." We will present others in future posts. This patio was designed by me and I helped install it at my daughter's home in Joliet. Along with me and my daughter, we had the help of her two sisters and two friends. The entire project was finished in a single weekend.
It is important to note that we hired a landscape contractor with his Bobcat tractor to excavate the site. He removed the old grass and 8 to 10 inches of soil. This allowed room for the gravel base for the brick pavers. We used his tractor to bring the gravel from the street where it had been dumped to the patio site. I strongly recommend that you not attempt this back breaking work yourself with a shovel and wheel barrow!
During the first day the excavation was finished, the gravel leveled and compacted with a rented compactor. That made the second day's work relatively easy. We merely had to set the bricks on a 1" layer of coarse sand. The sandstone retaining wall was set in place after the pavers were finished.
Future posts will talk about some ideas for how your patio should look...its shape, size, and brick style. But our patio was able to be completed so quickly due to the fact that not one single brick had to be cut. We purposely designed it that way. Brick cutting is time consuming, messy, and you have to rent a loud and expensive diamond saw. We will show you how to design your own patio to avoid any brick cutting.
You can see from the pictures that the patios consists of rows of concentric circles. Several manufacturers of brick pavers produce these in a number of colors and styles. There are four or five different brick shapes on the same pallet and the manufacturer will give you a "cheat sheet" that show which shapes and how many are needed for each circle as you work out from the center.
Complete details in future posts.
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