Remember this monstrosity? Well, it is no more! What did I do for four straight days last weekend? Well of course, work in the steamy Florida heat and finally lay down the paver walkway and landscaped the side of our house. Let me remind you of what this all looked like last February (I bought the pavers last summer planning on a winter project...but winter turned to Labor Day).
We had already removed all the boards and the sheds, as explained in three previous posts, go there to review how much work had already taken place - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. You can tell just how steamy it was in the picture above. That's my dad and sister helping to dig out the place we would need to level before we put in the pavers.
And more digging. This shows the strips of plywood we put down with stakes to mark the edges of the path and to give us a level height to work from. We leveled the plywood tops with a string and level that we marked off from the height of the pool deck so the pavers wouldn't be very far away from that. It was hard to be perfect. You can see in the above picture that we were working on leveling the dirt before we starting adding leveling sand to perfect the surface to lay the pavers on top of.
Here you can see we put down leveling sand on top of the dirt we had leveled the same way. This involved using the board my dad is holding and scraping it along the top of the plywood (shown in the right of the photo). It is called a screed. So that helped us make the dirt level and also the leveling sand level.
The path almost done with sand; nice and level.
Whole path done. Now to lift all the pavers and put them in place on the path. I picked some pavers that would create a natural looking path, not square and it was neat how they fit together like a puzzle.
This is what the path will look like....next we used polymeric sand to fill in the gaps. Polymeric sand does not promote weed growth, doesn't float away like regular sand/dirt, and also will harden somewhat. Follow the directions on the package...and one bucket of that stuff goes a long way.
Here you can see I next put down landscaping edging along the sides of the path, filled in the pathway with regular dirt to keep the pavers locked in place, and mulched and planted the sides of the path with Florida native species. I'm hoping these won't die like the last 3 sets of plants I tried.
Ta da! Just a reminder of what this looked like before! What a difference!

I hope you enjoyed this....I'm so glad it is done. And just in time to put our house up for sale because I got a new job in Tampa. Whew! And we have an open house this Saturday (tomorrow) that hopefully goes well :)