How to install your own paver driveway: part 8 Finale

In the last blog , I discussed putting in the concrete edging for the paver driveway.   In this blog I discuss wrapping up the last details of the paver driveway and my cost of the installation vs how much a contractor would charge.

To wrap up the installation, I decided I needed some bull nose coping at the entrance of the porch. The bull nose coping provides a rounded edge on the charcoal brick paver which mean less chance of tripping when stepping up on the porch.  Unfortunately Lowes could not get me some so this means taking the hour and half long drive to Oldcastle in Orlando.

Im not sure when Im going to take this drive.  But when I do I will also pick up some polymeric sand and sealer.  The polymeric sand I wiil probably go with is NextGel jointing sand which can be found at this link  This comes in at $24 per bag that covers about 60 to 120  square feet for narrow joints.

This sand is better for my application then the sand found at Lowes, because the sand at Lowe's requires a minimum of a 1/4" joint to fill.  My joints are 1/8" and the NextGel sand says it can be use on joints as small as 1/16".

The process of applying sand is: clean off the surface with a leaf blower.   Spread sand over the driveway with a broom.  Use a vibratory compactor on low setting to move the sand down the joint and then spread more sand with a broom.  Finally, clear off the surface with a leaf blower and wet the driveway.

And that is it.  Since the directions say to wait 30 days before the sealer is applied I did not bother to get the sealer at this point in time.  But this link has the stuff Im thinking about using.

Since I was not able to get the joint sand and sealer this weekend and because Im getting the final inspection done shortly....I feel that Im going to wait to apply the sand until the building department passes my work.   If they make me tear up my driveway for some reason I do not want to have to contend with the joint sand.  The survey is expected to happen on Tuesday.

Below are a few pictures without the joint sand.

So for this blog I'm jumping the gun a little and asking the question: how much did I save by doing the project myself.   Based on my friends paver driveway installation, the cost for a contractor where they chose the lowest of three bids the job comes in at $10 a square foot.   Since I have 750 square feet a contractor would have charged $7500.

It took me 99 hours to install my driveway minus the sealer and sand.

A break down of my expenses are as follows:

Dollars   Materials
337.33 terex excavator rental
330        dumpster
160        geotextile
332        tamper
1656.2    pavers
370       1.5" crushed concrete
308       3 /8" crushed concrete
              Total base depth 10"....which was overkill.
56.55     concrete
54        leaf blower
112        sand
219.25    Sealer
45           Bullnose coping

My total cost is $3980 resulting in $3520 savings.  That's a whopping 46 % saved.   Cue the cash register sound.

Happy Building.

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 7 Tamping the pavers and installing the concrete edging.

In the last blog I i discussed laying the pavers.   When I discussed this step I was not quite finished laying pavers.   I still had the walkway to do.   Well this time around I have the walkway finished except for the porch.   That will be next weekend.  The walkway minus the porch pavers is shown below.

I didn't do anything fancy with the walkway.  I thought about putting a nice serpentine curve on the border like almost every paver walkway has here in Florida, but I came to the conclusion that straight lines were very nice.  There would have been minimal benefit from doing a curvy walkway and based on the feels like 105 degree heat I was all for doing the walkway the quickest way.

I also did not make the walkway as wide as the porch due to the sewer clean out being next to the walkway at the corner of the porch.  It could have been easily moved and a wider walkway could have been had but making the walkway so that it didn't cover the clean out was good enough and it lines up with the door just fine so I pursued the route that required less work.

As can be seen from the picture the roof over hangs the walkway.  Often we have rain storms that are like monsoons here in Florida and this causes alot of water to run down the valley of the roof and hit the walkway.  Having just laid the pavers down, I was worried about the water washing out the base out so I went ahead and installed a gutter on the roof over the walkway.

For the next step I rented a vibratory plate compactor from home depot and ran over the pavers.  But before I did that I made sure the surface was free of stones by blowing it off with a leaf blower also rented form home depot.  Once clean I put the compactor on the lowest setting that it would work and ran over the all the edges.  Since the compactor knocked the edge bricks to the side I went around the edge dge and knocked them back in place.  Then I ran over the rest of the driveway two times.

Once this was done I bought some ready mix concrete, mixed it and placed it along the edges so that the pavers would be locked to the boundaries.  It took four bags to do about 80 feet of perimeter.  To finish the concrete, I smoothed the concrete off with a concrete edging tool.

All that's left is to add the porch pavers, joint sand and sealer.  But that's a job for next weekend.

That's all for now,

Happy Building.

The Dr.

How to install your own paver driveway: part 6 Laying the pavers

In the last blog I discussed preparing the driveway by making a curb, adding more fill for the pavers and screeding the fill so that it was flat.  In this blog I discuss laying the pavers.

The laying of the pavers actually took place during the week of the fourth of July.  I took three days vacations since at my company if you don't use it you loose it.  Whats nice about this week is that I was given two holidays as well so that means not being at work for 9 days.  I view this as quite the opportunity to make progress on my house.

Nevertheless, it was the fourth of July holiday and having fun that doesn't involve working on the house actually makes working on the house more tolerable and enjoyable and for me less likely to cause me to give up.  For the week, I went to my first NASCAR race at Daytona.   It was the coke zero 400.   I went with friends and I was the designated driver since I have a big vehicle.  When we got there we tailgated for a couple of hours and mostly spent time drinking beer, belching,  eating boiled peanuts and just being rednecks.  It was a good time.

The race was enjoyable which was surprising to me because I always said NASCAR is stupid.   The cars go around a loop and then repeat 200 times.  I get the point the first loop, no need to watch it 199 more times.  How boring it must be to watch the whole race.  Because of this attitude I never watched NASCAR or had an interest in it.

Nevertheless, I do have the rule that one should try everything at least once.  And when I was invited I decided to go.  It was actually very fun and there was always something different each loop.   There was probably an accident every 10 minutes.  And that is really kind of entertaining especially all the sparks that happen and the cars going airborne.  On the other hand I feel bad supporting activities where people get hurt.   But it seemed that these drivers always just go up and walked away unhurt.

I also like the sound of the car engines.  If any of you worked on engines before, you would probably think how beautiful the sound of the high performance NASCAR engines are once you heard one.  See the pic below where the pace car is shown starting the race off.

So back to laying pavers.  There was actually still yet another layer of fill to put on the driveway.  This fill is 1" of sand, but often the fines or the 3/8" crushed concrete is used.  In fact sometimes they call the crushed concrete sand.  I think that if crushed concrete is used for the final layer rather than sand there is a greater change of a paver cracking due to a stone under it.  Since I could not find sand in the quantity I needed that was acceptable for pavers, I went with the crushed concrete.

To install this final layer, I once again turned to the 1" galvanized pipes.  However, since this was the last layer it was the last chance to get the grading right.  My biggest concern was where the pavers met with the curb and the garage slab.   To ensure this was precise I shimmed the pipes to the correct level.  For the garage I chose 2.5" below the top of the slab.  The pavers are 2 and 3/16".  I actually wanted the pavers to be a little lower at the garage entrance since this would help puddling in the garage to not be an issue.  I also figured that the compacting step would make the pavers sink another 1/8".  See the shimming and the results of the screeding process in the pics below.

As a side note I ran the compactor just before I put this final layer in and plan to run the compactor once the pavers are placed.  It is important not to compact the final layer until the pavers are in place so that any unevenness that results in placing pavers can be taken out.  Furthermore, once 10' of fines was placed I removed the pipes and filled them in and smoothed them with a trowel.  I was very careful not to step on the graded fill this time and was successful at not doing that..

To help in making sure the pavers were straight and lined up I used a guide line from the garage entrance to the curb.  I did the math for a triangle and used a tape measure to make sure the line was perpendicular to the house,  Nevertheless, I moved the line after had some pavers placed because I never seemed to be able to follow it precisely.  Because of this I would go to curb and check to see if the pavers looked straight to the eye.  A few times I had to make some minor corrections.

To cut the pavers I bought the harbor freight 10" wet tile saw.  This tool was a joy to use as it cut the pavers very well and easily.  The tile saw can be found at this link.  If you buy it remember to find the 20% off coupon online.  Also the only blade I found that was proper for mounting with this tool was at harbor freight.  Homedepot and Lowes had adapters on their blades and they just seemed to be not a good idea for this saw because of its mounting design.  The blade can be found at this link.

The actual laying of the pavers was pretty easy.  Since I had 9 pallets of pavers I pulled the pavers from all the pallets at the same time to minimize color variation.  I used a wheel barrow to aid in the transport of the pavers.  Since I was using the T pattern in my driveway, I had to use two rectangular pavers for every square paver.  Luckily the 2 to 1 ratio is the way the pallets are shipped.  It pays to do things the standard way sometimes.

When I placed the pavers, I made sure to touch the two sides with the already placed pavers and then drop the paver on the fines.   This guaranteed that the fines were not holding the pavers apart.  This i known as the click and drop method.  I have seen in some videos workers put spacers between the pavers.  This is a good idea if you want a larger gap.  Some paver joint sand wants to have a 1/4" min gap.   With My drop and click method the nubs on the pavers gave me an 1/8" gap.

The type of pavers I bought were Apian Stone pavers with the abocoa color.   The border I decided to do with charcoal bricks.

The driveway basically goes straight and then make a 30 degree turn.  To make the turn I used 11 charcoal pavers and cut them into wedges by knocking off about 3 degrees on each brick.  This made a beautiful looking arc Shown below.

Because of the turn the guide string was no longer useful.  However, the galvanized pipe I used for screeding is straight and I used it to get my border straight down to the curb.

Most oft he pavers that needed to be cut only required a straight cut.  And the tile saw is excellent for this.   But I was faced with three areas that had curves.  There are a number of ways to tackle this.  For example lay the pavers down and use a demo saw to cut the arc.   I did not have a demo saw and it cost  $50 to rent one.  Rather than do that I tried the masonry blade in the angle grinder route.  I quickly learned that it was possible to score the paver and then use a demo hammer to break the paver along the score.   However, after experimenting with this for  half hour I decided to do the curves the easy way.   I chose the smallest paver I have and made one straight cut on them to make the curve.  Using a series of the smaller straight cut pavers along the curved edge looks surprisingly well since my curves were shallow curves and there is sort of an optical illusion that makes the the cut look curved. This of course means that the pattern is ignored at the curve edge but to tell you the truth it looks good anyway.

For the entire week that I wasn't enjoying myself I laid pavers and the actual laying process took about 21 hours for about 700 square feet of driveway.  That doesn't count the base prep.  The progress I made with the driveway wet is shown below.

My time on the house is now confined to weekends once again.  The tasks that remain are, finish walkway paver laying, compacting the pavers, putting cement keepers along the perimeter, placing the joint sand and then putting the sealer on.   All in all this should take three weeks.  

See you in the next blog,

Happy Building,

The Dr.