LESLIE: Charlotte in Louisiana is on the line. Is dealing with a water issue on the patio. What’s going on?
CHARLOTTE: We have a small patio on the back of our house and we want to extend it out to help divert the water. The water needs to – the rainwater needs to flow through our yard and we want to – I wanted to know what might be decorative that wouldn’t just look like a slab of concrete and that would also help slope down to allow the water to flow through our yard.
TOM: Why don’t you build the new section out of paver bricks and pick a color that compliments the existing concrete patio? You can almost surround it. I mean you can have brick color, you can have a gray-stone color. There’s lot of different colors associated with that. And you could make it look like it was designed to be that way, almost like two sections.
What do you think, Leslie?
LESLIE: Mixed materials are such a huge trend right now for outdoor spaces, so that really is a good way to cleverly give yourself that height difference that you need to move that water away.
CHARLOTTE: So the paver bricks could – because I was wanting – instead of just having it squared off, I was wanting to kind of angle it maybe to look maybe like a path that had some character to it. Could I do that with the paver brick?
LESLIE: You can. You can do anything with the paver bricks. And they come in a variety of shapes and sizes and thicknesses, as well. So if you wanted to use something to look like a pathway, you could very easily do that.
CHARLOTTE: OK. And that wears pretty well, huh?
TOM: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. OK.
TOM: Do a good job on the install. A lot of times, people don’t install paver patios properly and they don’t put the right base down. And then they start to heave and wave and get saggy and weird and weeds grow up through them. But if you have it dug out properly and you have a good, solid base and you lay the bricks in right, it gives you many, many years of life.
CHARLOTTE: OK. So we could have a concrete base and then put the paver bricks on.
TOM: Not a concrete base. It would be a crushed-stone base that would be tamped down very, very well.
LESLIE: So you dig down, first, however many inches. It depends on the thickness of your paver stone. So you dig down, usually, two or three times that thickness. You put down a stone, tamp that down. It’s like a contractor mixed material of stone. What do they call that? A number …
TOM: It’s like a crushed gravel.
LESLIE: It’s like an aggregate.
CHARLOTTE: OK. Gotcha.
TOM: I think, actually, they call it “stone base.”
LESLIE: So you put that down, tamp it down, then you put sand over that, tamp that down. This way, you’re just compressing it and compressing, compressing into a structurally stable base. And once the sand is down and tamped and everything is level and stable, then you put your pavers on top of it, and add paver brick locking sand mix to keep them from moving.
CHARLOTTE: OK. Good deal. OK. Well, that’s great. Alright. Thank you so much. I appreciate the info.
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