All You Need to Know About Making a Patio For Your Home
Patio areas can help you to make your outdoor spaces around your home far more usable and enjoyable. These areas can also help improve the curb appeal of your home as well, which also increases the value of your entire property. Patio spaces are actually pretty easy to build yourself, but even if you are looking at having experts build your patio space to know how patio builds work.
Landscape pavers are often the most affordable way to create these spaces, but you have other options when it comes to building materials as well. You will find that patio areas can run the gamut when it comes to cost, so the more you know about what you have as far as choices for your patio build, the better.
How to Build a Patio in Your Backyard
1. Choose Your Space Carefully
You need to think carefully about where you are going to build your patio. You might think, oh, I’ll just put it right outside the back door, and that will be good enough. However, if you are going to build a patio, you need to consider that you will save money and time if you build the entire ideal space in your yard all at once.
Consider what you are planning to do when it comes to future use of your yard. If you actually want a big patio, then you should just build one from the start. Creating a small space and then having to add to it will just add cost and potentially lead to issues with the two areas of your patio looking like they weren’t built at the same time.
2. Remove Landscaping
You will have to remove the landscaping that is currently taking up the place where your patio will be installed. Grass, soil, and any other plant roots need to be carefully removed from the space. You will need to bring in fill soil and things like gravel in most cases to level the area properly. Make sure that you are prepared to handle all of the steps to level the area correctly. If you miss steps during this part of the process, your patio might end up failing down the road or, at minimum, looking lumpy and uneven.
Most of us will not be skilled enough to pour our own concrete patio, but if you are going to install a solid concrete patio, you need to be sure that you are prepared to make the area level and solid before you pour the concrete pad.
3. Outline the Patio
Make sure that you know exactly where your patio needs to be laid out. You will mark the edges, and you will need to indicate the edges of the patio space as well. This is really critical when it comes to laying pavers, as you need to be sure that you don’t forget where the edges of your patio will end up being. You might need to cut pavers down to the right shapes and sizes to match the intended edges of your patio.
Outlining the patio can also help you to determine if you have set up a patio that will work for your needs. Sometimes, visualizing the patio can help you to decide if you are building something that will work for your needs. This is a great time to adjust the size or shape of your patio if you have realized that you are not happy with what you have planned out.
4. Add Landscape Fabric
You will need to add landscape fabric to the space so that weeds and plants don’t grow in between your pavers or around the edges of your patio. No matter what material you want to make your patio from, you will need to prep before you add your patio to the area. Landscaping fabric is really affordable and simple to work with. This is one of the most effective ways to weed-proof your yard around your patio as well.
Landscape fabric can be the best way to keep your yard from being hard to care for. If you are sick to death of weeds that need to be pulled, investing in landscape fabric is a great way to save yourself the time and annoyance of this process.
5. Top Paver Patios With Sand
Paver patios need to be topped with sand to ensure that the spaces between the pavers are maintained. You will be able to remove the excess sand with a leaf blower and then you will want to mist the patio with some water to help cement the sand in between the pavers.
This process will need to be repeated a week later to make sure that the patio stays in place for good. If you skip this step, you will be more likely to see pavers that are out of place or gaps in the edges of your patio, which no one likes to see.
Patios Can Make Great Outdoor Spaces for All Kinds of Activities
Patios are a really great kind of space to add to your yard for so many reasons. You will be able to create so much more usable space in your outdoor areas if you add a patio to your back or front yard. This is a process that you can tackle yourself if you wish, but you might also want to hire someone to lay a patio for you. There are a few steps that absolutely must be done to create a quality patio that will hold up to years of use, so be sure that you feel confident in all of the steps before you start creating a patio on your own.
If you are hiring someone to install your patio, you need to know the basics so that you can be sure that you are working with a team that knows all about the work that needs to be done. Being an informed consumer is always ideal, and this guide will help you get started in your research about patio installation.
