New Walkway, Porch, Seating Wall and Fire Pit
During the cooler times of the year, outdoor living areas like patios and fire pits can be a great place to hang out. Here a few things to keep in mind during the year to keep your outdoor living area beautiful from YardMasterz.com; first, you want to keep the debris and dirt off. Keeping your patio clean not only keeps it looking good, but also keeps weeds from finding their way into the joints. Second, keeping the area clean, can prevent mold or mildew forming on the pavers. In severe cases where you have to pressure wash them to get clean, some of the joint sand can get blown out making it necessary to re-sand. Also, keep the grass edged off your pavers so it does not start to invade the sand joints.
If you don’t have a paver patio yet, here are a few things to keep in mind. The finished patio always seems smaller than you thought if would. Not sure why that is, but it almost always happens. The bad part is it is often very hard to match new pavers to older ones. There can be color variations between runs of pavers when manufactured. If you think you may want outdoor landscape lighting, put in the wires or wire chases during the patio construction. This can save you not only money later, but headaches by not having to pull up work to place wiring in. Also if you think you may want under seat lights on a seating wall or on the ends of a wall or stairs, put the fixture in ahead of time to keep from having to redo walls and capstones.
One last thing, if you decide to tackle a project such as pavers on your own, the winter months are a good time to do it. There is less rain to give you problems with putting down and compacting the base material, and it is not 100 degrees outside with the sun beating down on you and then also the pavers radiating the heat back at you. Just take your time in compacting the base material, keep your project square, straight and sloping away from your home and in short order, you can have a beautiful porch and the pride of doing it yourself.