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.