How they installed my brick paver driveway & walkway
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We live on the corner of a street and cul-de-sac, so we have a corner faced by 2 streets in our front yard. A lot of houses in this area have "pull through driveways", I think they are also called executive driveways, where part of the yard is converted into a driveway which you can pull stright thru. For lots on the corners, we can just cut across the yard. For the lots in the middle of the street, they have half circle driveways.

To see some of our neighbors driveways
[click here]

Billy, our job supervisor, started the process by using a laser level to mark the slope from pad at our courtyard to the far side of the driveway.

He marked it so we would have 2" of declination to encourage the water to run away from the courtyard, down the driveway to the street.

Then he put in a couple of other stakes to mark the slope towards the sidewalk. Turns out that the sidewalk at the neck of the cul-de-sac is 6" below the entrance to our courtyard, and the street is 18" below.

I asked if he was going to bring out a bobcat or a back-hoe. He smiled and said "we don't need that, just a couple of guys are going to be fine".

Day 1 of the job - sorry, I didn't get any pictures. Just like Billy said, 2 guys showed up to dig out the driveway. As hard as the dirt is (I think it is called coleche), I was figuring they would be done with driveway in about a month. Then they pulled out an electric jack hammer, and started to chop away at the dirt with it. Incredibly they could easily cut chucks of dirt about 12" square and pop them out whole. By the end of the first day, they were 80% done with the digging. The materials showed up too, the sand and gravel / sand mix was dropped off and pallates of paver stones.

Day 2 - The 2 guys from yesterday plus 6 more showed up. They all hustled to get the rest of the driveway dug out. Picks were flying, that jack hammer was running more, and dirt was quickly moving out to the street.

When fully excavated, it looks like they went down 8-12". When getting quotes from other contractors, I was told various depths for how deep they would go, and Home Depot / Barazani were going to dig the deepest. Makes sense too, because after the pavers go on, the roots from the trees and grass that used to be there are all going to rot, and leave a cavity. That cavity might collapse creating a dip or low spot. Removing all of that soil and replacing it with the masonry gravel & sand takes care of the problem up front.

This is the masonry gravel & sand mixture going in.

The rake he is using looks like a 6' wide piece of angle iron - and it doesn't have teeth, just a flat blade.

Going over it with the plate compactor and wetting down. That compacter weighs a couple hundred pounds, but when vibrating it is just a cinch to push around.

I didn't get a picture of it, but hte way they put the sand down is to lay down a couple of pieces of conduit at the right level, then toss sand over top of it. Then they run a board across the conduit to smooth out the sand.

Next it is just a matter of placing the paver bricks down. Notice the string in the sand, it runs from the black stake in the foreground, goes under his legs and to the sidewalk. This seems to be the way he could make the pattern straight.

Now to make the edging. To mark the edge they were going to cut, they used a flexible piece of PVC pipe. Since our edges were longer than the 10' pieces they had, they joined them up with couplers to make long enough sticks.

BBBZZZZZZZZ..... Here come the stone cutting saws.

In some of the tutorial instructions on the internet, they show people cutting the bricks individually with a sliding table cutting saw, a guillotine stone cutter, or breaking them with a stone chisel. But this takes a bunch of time, the pavers would have to be removed one after the other, marked and cut. The way they did it, they just cut thru all of the stones at one time. Sure it is noisy as heck, but makes nice clean cuts that follow the curve.

Finally to lock the pavers in place, they dug a trench around the perimeter, layed in rebar and placed the outer rim of pavers in concrete. They said that others use cheap plastic edging around the outsides, but that edging will loosen with time, and the concrete works so much better.



Done is just 2 days ? Wow, with motivated workers like this, I can start to see how the pyramids in Egypt could have been built.

So that pretty much is the last thing we wanted to do for the front yard.

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