it holds the car

The pattern gets a little wonky at the end there, but it's done!!

Instead of renting a vibrating plate compactor to settle the sand we just jumped up and down a lot and stomped on all the bricks.


Then I drove the car over it a couple times to really settle everything in. I'm sure I'll need to resweep it with sand one or two more times, but hey - it totally held up the car, and that's pretty much all I can ask for.

<-- You can see the new bricks on the bottom right here, because they're still wet from washing. That last little corner took awhile to try to get it to hold to the pattern.

Speaking of pattern.. Dan doesn't think I should mention it, because if it had worked it should be obvious.. but since we had so many different colors I wanted to make a plaid driveway! does it look plaid at all??


And then I parked the car on it, and you pretty much can't see it at all.. since we almost never drive this is about the most you'll ever be able to see! sigh..

















Meanwhile, Dan was inside framing in the new bathroom!!

More on that exciting development tomorrow!

midweek brick update

I managed to get home with a little bit of daylight left, and was determined to finish the driveway. Wouldn't you know it, I RAN OUT OF BRICKS!!! A whole chimney and a foundation, and I didn't have enough bricks for a measly little driveway!!?


I filled the sand in on what was there though, and it's amazing how finished it looks!


You basically just sweep sand over it to fill in the gaps, and it acts as mortar and holds everything in place. Plus, it instantly looks like it's been here 100 years!






So close, and yet so far away..


One of the neighbors said she has a pile of bricks in her backyard that I could have if I dug them out.. so it looks like this Saturday is another powerwashing day..

She's a brick.. layer

It's finally brick time!!

I started off Saturday by sorting all the bricks into stacks by color and size - there are a ton of different shapes and colors. Most of the people who know what they're doing told us we'd be much better off buying pavers, because a driveway made of varying size bricks was likely not to last long. Aside from being stubborn, I just can't conceive of the waste of having a chimney-full of bricks at home, and buying brand-new ones for a driveway. But I did decide to lay them in sand instead of mortar. In general, you want the mortar to be softer than the bricks so that if anything breaks (because of settling, uneven loads, or just bad installation) it's the mortar and not the bricks. Since we have old, soft bricks, and I've never laid bricks before, I decided using sand instead of mortar was the way to go.

The concrete was poured low enough to have an inch of mortar and a standard size brick, which would be flush with the sidewalk. After I swept out the driveway, we snapped a chalk line an inch up, which would be the surface of the sand.

The woman at the store told me a 100lb bag of sand would cover an area of 100 square feet, at 1" deep. With a 135 square foot driveway, plus filling in the spaces, I figured 3 bags would be way more than enough.

I planned to pour and screed about a third of the area, lay the bricks, then do the next area..

well.. it turns out a 100lb bag of sand covers an area of 10 square feet at 1" deep. That's quite a difference!!

Back in the truck, back to the hardware store, and back home to unload 20 50lb bags of sand .. by about 4pm I was finally ready to start laying bricks!


I went with a standard basket weave pattern, and it worked out that I only needed one cut brick every other row.

I leveled the rows from side to side, and tried to make sure that the slop toward the house was even.. Since the bricks were so different in shape and size, having an even bed of sand to lay them on didn't really save much time. I still had to pour extra sand on, or scrape some out of the way for each brick

By the time it was too dark to see on Saturday night I think I had 2 and a half rows done.


Sunday morning, I got out there early and progress was slow, but steady.

I was joking about it with neighbors, but I really did need to re-estimate how long it would take because so many people stopped by to chat! It was a sunny, nice weekend and everyone was out, and everyone is so friendly here.. let's just say by about 4 o'clock on Sunday I was seriously regretting my little motivational plan of parking my motorcycle in the garage to be sure I'd be done with the driveway by Monday morning..






I brought some lights out and worked as long as I could, but it got to the point that I could barely move. My knees were actually bleeding and there was no way I was going to get done anyway. So I threw a piece of thick plywood down, took a long hot shower, and sat down to write a post.

The Patio is Done!!!

Well Sorta Anyways...still needs one more cleaning and then they are going to seal it. Then we need to hook up the gas lines to the fire pit and BBQ and re-route the wires for the lights, and , and,...

Here the guys from Icon are making the final preparations to pour the patio. They've got the drain rock in and the under slab drainage and the plastic vapor barrier and then the re-bar. All this drainage is tied into our sump pit for the foundation. We hope that the sump pump can handle the extra flow.

Here's the obligatory shot of them pumping the concrete. They used the same make-it-as-you-need-it truck as last time. This time the truck driver seemed to pay more attention to the mix and it came out much more consistent in its composition.
We had to go run some errands so we didn't get any shots of them stamping in the pattern and coloring the concrete....


But here's a shot of it all done!!!! Yahoo! doesn't it look so great! Look, no expansion joints in the patio. They did the pattern deeper and we are hoping its enough to stop any major cracking.


Here's the other side. The retaining wall/benches are a blue gray and the patio floor is a sage green.
The lights are on in this shot but its still too light out to see them.


Here's the all over shot. I had to crawl way up high at the corner of the yard to get it all in.
How does it look? We are super excited about it. Can't wait to have a fire in the fire pit.
Looks like a pool with a swim up bar doesn't it?



Here's a close up of the texture of the patio floor.
Looks good doesn't it?
Kinda a sage green right?


Here's a closer-up shot of the benches. Nice blue-grey color and a nice texture.
This shot was taken at dusk so the lights are starting to have some effect.



A closer up shot of the stairs at dusk. We think we goofed a bit on the light here in the stairs. It does not light up enough of the stairs. We will have to figure out a way to light them better that does not light up too much of the patio.



This was about as dark as we could get it and still have the fricken camera focus well. The lights are on and starting to look pretty good don't ya think?


Here's a dusky overhead shot of our sunken patio. Not really in focus but it gives you an idea of how much the patio is lit.
It's exactly what we wanted. Just soft low level light for night time parties.




That's it for now. Irene has been working all weekend on the bricks in the driveway. Hopefully our next post will be all about the driveway and how great it looks!

Just powerwashing in the rain..

Power tools are fun!

Last weekend the unseasonably sunny days brought everyone out, so there was some chatting with the neighbors that cut into the brick cleaning progress.. but a crappy, rainy day and a loud power washer makes for speedy uninterrupted cleaning!

Most of the time was taken up getting bricks from the stack in the backyard up to the front and laid out in the street. (Who needs a gym?! I did a million squats today with weights!) There was some scraping of stubborn mortar, but the dirt pretty much came flying off. I cleaned one side, scraped the ones that needed it, flipped them, and cleaned the other side.

And apparently, I made quite a sight out in my rain slicker in the street. It actually stopped raining Sunday afternoon, which is just as well since I really need to clean my outfit before it rains again and have to wear it to work!

In 3 days last weekend I cleaned 143 bricks. This weekend, I cleaned 409.

I'd be a little more bitter about that wasted time, but it was nice to chat with all the neighbors, and I wouldn't've been able to lay the driveway yet anyway. Because there's still more concrete to pour in the back, there will be a concrete truck and crew traipsing through that would have been ill-advised on a partially completed driveway.


Here's the current state of the pool/patio/sunken living room.. the rain washed all the loose pigment off the surface, so you can begin to see the cool color and texture. The drainage is in place, and short lengths of rebar are sticking out of the retaining walls, ready to be tied to reinforcements for the slab.

Plan is for the slab to be poured this week..

Turns out, 3 days aren't enough...

We had such grand plans for our 3-day weekend! We went and picked up the toilet for the downstairs bathroom, checked in on the doors we've been trying to order for more than a month, and bought a bunch of siding to patch the area over the garage door, which was Dan's task for the weekend. I had my stack of bricks to clean, which hopefully would be put down in the driveway. I don't want to give away the ending, but the toilet is still in the box, the doors still haven't been ordered, the siding is stacked in the garage, and there aren't anywhere near enough bricks for the driveway.

Dan started prying off the odd bits on the end where a whole run would go back in, and there were a few boards that were rotted. Well, as you might expect, that was just the beginning, and it now looks like this spring will involve replacing a whole lotta wood on the porch, starting with this post right here.






With another storm approaching it seemed like a bad idea to spend the last sunny day tearing everything apart, so Dan primed all the freshly exposed wood and patched the hole with a piece of plywood. (you can see the stack of pretty siding in the garage in this shot.. sigh..)
Then he primed the plywood too.








From the street it doesn't look half bad!


The house already looks way better than when we bought it, and by this summer should look pretty good from the outside.












And what was I doing all this time??

sitting around eating bon-bons??

If by that you mean scraping and scrubbing piles of bricks with no end in sight, then yes! bon-bons.

Looks like next weekend the brick cleaning continues..

Patio Pour

This is our back door moments before the sunken outdoor living room started to be poured.

We used to have to duck to walk under that back deck, and look at it now! It already looks remarkably like the plans.











The retaining walls are nice and beefy, and will have drainage behind them, as well as under the slab.



Here's a shot into the rebar reinforcing the walls/benches










And a shot from above showing the corner radius and our built-in firepit! That diagonal trench is for the gas line so we can have one propane tank next to the house that feeds both the bbq and the firepit.


You can see the slope of the benches which will make them more comfortable to sit in.




This is the coolest concrete truck I've ever seen! (and I've seen my fair share of concrete trucks recently..)
It has a wall down the middle with cement on one side and the aggregate on the other. They hooked it up to our hose and mixed the concrete on the spot. It was WAY louder than the usual trucks, but there's no waste. The guys working had mixed opinions though.. because it's mixed on demand the mixture can be adjusted for conditions, but it also is less consistent than a pre-mixed truck, so every so often they'd need to stop and readjust it. I took a little video of the truck in action, and you can see that the concrete was waay thicker than it should be. That was easily corrected a minute later, but someone has to be paying close attention at all times. I think it's the coolest thing ever, plus it has the advantage of not only being very environmental, since there's no extra concrete that needs to be dumped at the end of a day; but it's also very good for the bottom line, since you only pay for what you use, which means it's much more likely more businesses would use it.

The video:





I won't bore you with the million shots of concrete flowing into the forms, but this one shows the rebar in the steps, along with the box for a light.









This is the concrete being poked and prodded to make sure there are no air pockets, and that the concrete completely fills the forms











And then the really cool part started..

These are the latex stamps which are just about to be used to pound a texture into the fresh concrete.








Once the concrete sets up enough for the forms to be removed, a skim coat with color is buttered on. The pigment is also a hardening agent, so it makes the surface even sturdier.


Expansion joints were cut at random, to make it look less like concrete and more like giant, very conveniently curved, slabs of slate. They even had a chisel which cut edges that looked just like the uneven edges of a piece of slate.




Then an accent color is dusted on and the pounding begins. It's a race for time at this point, as the concrete needs to be hard enough to take the texture, but not so hard that it won't.





I took a little video of the stamping too.. It was quite a team effort, and very labor intensive




After a couple days it's pressure washed, then about a month later it'll be sealed which also brings out the colors. Since neither of of those things have happened yet, I didn't take too many pictures of where it's at right now. They'll be pouring the patio slab on Wednesday (assuming the no rain holds up for awhile longer), so there will be many more pictures to come.

And now, I've got to get back to my giant stack of bricks.. they're not going scrub themselves.