Easiest Patio Paver Walkway Install

Today, I'm going to show you the absolutely easiest way to install PA walkway that's not only beautiful, but it's also way easier than pouring concrete. So, whether you're enhancing your hightraic area in your backyard or maybe making a path to your garden, this DIY project is perfect for any skill level. Let's get into it. What we have here is roughly around 500 square ft around this cabin of walkway. So, the dirt that we're dealing with here is uneven dirt. It's bumpy. So, if you're tearing anything out at your place, you might have to be doing the step as well. We're going to have to be leveling this area, making sure it slopes away from the house for water drainage situations, but at the same time, we're going to need to give it a nice strong base to make sure that our new pavers are going to be not sinking in the ground in the situation of like a monsoon or something. I'm going to get some heavy equipment. I've done some pretty dumb stuff in my life and all of them included using a shovel. And today, I'm not going to be breaking my back. I went to Tate's rented for the day this skid steer. I got a big old load of road mix on top. I'm going to try spreading it, but also see if I can break off all this really hard dirt that's sitting on top, giving us a, let's just say, a little bit smoother platform to work with. It's a tight fit. I'm glad I got a small one, not a big one. If precision ever mattered, it's mattering right now. We're working with a gas line, about 5 ft of space, a brand new build construction, and a retaining wall. Things go south, I'm going this way, hopefully. So, we got delivered 17 yards of road mix. Road mix is important because roadm compacts really well, which you have to get a compactor as well. What it does is it creates a nice strong foundation. So, any paver that we put on top, when the water starts soaking up into the soil, it won't start sinking all your rock or or your pavers down into that mud. it'll stay afloat and keeping us all afloat. Uh 17 yards. I think I paid 275 bucks with delivery fee, which is like 90 bucks. So, not terrible. I figured it would be a smarter way for me to actually have a solid path. There's a huge divot in there, so this mini skid ends up tilting over. So, I'll start basically creating a safe path so I can get on the other side of the house. All right, we got probably half of the 17 yards. We probably did about seven yards of road mix. Got couple inches of nice solid base here. Getting the slope away from the house. Now, we're going to slap the snot out of this thing using our weight packer. Whack Packer. What's the other one? I remember the excavation guy said. Anyh who, you don't understand the reference, so it doesn't matter. But we're going to snap the snot of it. It's going to compress it all. Once we got a nice flat surface that's nice and hard, we're going to hit it up with a little bit of water to allow the sand to settle down. And then we're going to whack it again. And that's going to give us a nice solid surface to start working with. Let's talk about our pavers right now. So, I was going to go the route of pouring concrete, pouring my own individual pavers like a complete lunatic. But then after crunching some numbers, it's not really worth it. And here's why. An average bag of concrete 80 lb is about $7.80. We'll round it up to 8 bucks depending where you're at. For these molds being 30 in long by 15 in deep, we would be requiring a pore that's at least 3 12 in thick for stabilization. With that in mind, we would need two bags per mold. That would do a grand total of $16 per mold. And we need about 100 linear feet of that. Now, the cost also has a lot of hidden fees. Like you have your 2x4s, about $100 worth of 2x4s for your mold themselves. Then you have your screws. Then you have to rent your concrete mixer, which is about $150 to $250 per week. All that stuff adds up. Not to mention, it's going to break your back. Now, the direction we're taking it is we're buying our paper, saving our back, saving ourselves from mixing individual bags of concrete. And this is a product from Home Depot. It's a Yusede Rio concrete paver. They are $17.80 each. So meaning for an extra, let me do my math right. For an extra $180, you're going to save your back. You're going to keep yourself from mixing all of the concrete yourself, plus floating everything, plus doing all the edges, and you don't need any kind of additional stabilizing stuff except for sand, which we will get to that. Let's start unloading these onto the skid and just throw these papers around. And don't worry, stick around to the very end and I'll give you the exact breakdown in case you have a project in mind on your property. I'll give you the exact dollar amount what I paid to get this project done. Let's fire up these engines, boys, and get the papers rocking. I should get some gloves before I start tearing the snot out of my hands. Moving right along. I just picked up, I would say, between 3 and 4 cubic yards of sand. Sand's very important here because we need an even distribution of force on top of these pavers. If there's a slight variation over time, the thing will just snap on you and crack and nobody wants that. You can use sand. I've done it plenty of times. Or if you really want to be bougie like that, you can pick up paver sand, which it's so fine, it's like a powder, which creates even more stability. But this this works all the time perfectly. Going to grab my skid loader, start dropping this puppy out, and I'll show you the secret to making sure this sucker from PA to PA is going to be leveled and continuous with the rest of them, not looking like this all the way through. So, what we're doing here is we're laying down the 3/4in PVC to work as basically a guide for us, right? This is going to keep everything uniform and together by pouring the sand over. We're then going to take a 2x4 and start screing the sucker back. Obviously, overlapping it enough. And then when we put our pavers on top of it, they're going to be matching the same exact profile. Not to mention, by the time we tamp them down, they're going to working flush all the way through, making this PA look clutch. Oh, we put way too much. Let this be a lesson to you folks. Don't get too excited about dropping loads of sand. A little goes a long way. Yeah. [Music] Yeah. We're doing really damn good on time. Um, really damn pretty damn good. Sorry. Uh, everything's going down really well. We're about day two into it. Really happy how this is laying down. Uh, got a good order of operation. Here's my only dilemma here. The back of the cabin, it was easy to lay out the path how we wanted to do. This is pretty simple. Right off here, centered with the opening. However, this pathway here I'm a little unsure about. Part of me knows that since the landing butts up to these stairs here, it only makes sense to continue it matching this brick distance as it's over there. But I'm a weird person about symmetry. Uh it doesn't really go to that faucet which you need to use it. However, the idea I'm kind of arguing with is with this A-frame, all the snow comp piles off. So really this section is not really usable to come up to that for any reason at all. So what I'm thinking is possibly match it on this side the same way as that retaining wall. Have the path come here, put edging right there and put little planters, you know, flowers and whatnot, uh, and all the pee gravel that'll be there. And then that way the faucet will be in the little quote unquote little garden box area. Option number two really sounds really good to me right now and I think I'm going to go with it. If you have any advice, I'd love to hear them in the comment section below. Two good news for you. Number one, I got the perfect amount of sand. Yes. Second great news is we're ready to lay our pavers because we have a nice dead flat stabilizing base going, folks. Now, what the hell are we thinking in terms of patterns? Let me tell you, my goal is going to be to work off of these uh landscaping steps and going straight purely for aesthetic reasons. Then we're going to have a path going this way. All of this area and this area is going to be like a garden bed. So we're going to XNA on that for now and I'll show you what we're going to do with it. The idea is going to lay the PA down, put a 2x4 for equal gapping, put the next PA down, and go on and so forth. Give it a little light tap just to make sure it compresses the sand and then follow our little string line that we already etched out. This is going to look incredible. And I can't wait to show you not only how much money I saved compared to concrete, but also how cool this looks. We're hauling them, folks. We're really hauling them right now. Uh, we got a nice little L going here. Took us a minute to get position, see how much offset we want. Obviously, this wall in the 90 is not perfectly straight with a, you know, retaining wall. So, we're making these little micro adjustments. Really happy how it sits. The fresher your sand is, meaning the day of that you spray it, the more maneuverability you have, little adjustments left to right. If it sits overnight, tends to harden a little bit more. But that's where using PA uh sand uses actually works a lot more paper base is works a lot better. Again, the finer it is, the better. But so far, I'm not disappointed. Pretty damn straight. [Music] Well, I'm not going to lie to you. My back is tight. It's tighter than a Well, I don't want to say anything inappropriate. It's just tight as hell. What we're going to do now is to create this path a little garden box. Like I mentioned, uh we end up pivoting this off the wall a few more extra inches. So, we're about uh 9 in off of this, no, 10 inches off this wall. So, we're going to match that 10 in here. I picked these little edges for landscaping. They have a couple of two versions. Well, there's multiple versions. Uh there's the coiled stuff which is great for different snake like patterns, radiuses, or there's straight stuff like this. Both are pretty pricey, but I went with the straight stuff because I don't need any curvature. I want actually symmetry of angles. So measure 10 in off the thing, carry it around, and do the same thing except on the other side. There's going to be a slight little bevel, which I think is going to look freaking dope. Oh, and I got some stakes with it. All right, here's what we got. We got 3/8 aggregate. Why aggregate and not pearl? Because aggregate tends to with the sharp edges tends to compress and hold together versus pravel smooth and tends to kind of go all over the place. But you can use like mulch glue, I believe, which works great. Um, we'll see if we have to use it here. So, the idea is spread it. We're going to work section by section because when we get around, first of all, we cannot get this thing onto the pavers anymore cuz it'll probably crack them. So, we're going to work section by section dumping it. And as we're making our own path, we'll be able to travel with a wheelbarrow on the pavers themselves. And I'm just very happy I said wheel barrel and not wheel barrel because last time I made a video saying that I got chewed up in the comment section. [Music] Well, I'm sweating up a storm here. Got everything, all the gravel laid out. Uh everything looking great. We still got to clean it up. We still got to brush it all. Make sure it's nice and tidy. But before we do that, I'm going to start laying out my weed fabric for all this little garden beds all the way around. Uh just to keep any weeds from coming through. Throw some mulch on it just to make give it another contrast of color. Tie it all together nicely. A lot of stone going out here. So, a little bit of nice dark brown mulch is going to go a long way. It's going to look beautiful. Let's just be honest. I'm going to call it as it is. It's going to look rad. [Music] All [Applause] [Music] right, folks. The steps turned out incredible. I couldn't be happier. And the total cost to do everything you saw in this video was $2,177. And it only took us 3 days to do. And the most incredible part about it is that I was quoted $3,000 for labor alone to do this entire pad. Money saved, time saved. I couldn't be happier. But the big question is, what the hell should we build next? [Music]