You don’t need a lot of tools to make your own cement patio. You just need a wheelbarrow and some manual labor. Your work space should be at least 6-feet by 8-feet. Place a 4-inch layer of sand on the base of your patio with the wheelbarrow. Then layer another 4 inches of sand and one 6 inches of aggregate: pea gravel or crushed rock.
Place the last layer of sand on top and compact it with your hands. If you’re not sure about the quality of your work, place a piece of wood under each corner to act as a guide for compaction. That will prevent slippage and help you get into the corners more easily. When you are finished compacting, eliminate any dry spots with a shovel until your patio is completely covered.
If you are building a patio, you need a strong foundation. Concrete is the obvious choice, and it’s the most popular option. But in some cases concrete isn’t right. If you want to make your patio look good, there are alternatives that are just as strong, but look better.
If you want to build concrete patio with no holes or cracks or gaps, you need cement. Lots of it. Not just the little 2-pound bags that builders use; you need enough to fill an entire truck bed. And it will cost a lot of money. A bag of cement weighs 60 pounds; one truck bed can hold 100 bags; a typical construction site might have 10 trucks on site at any time; that’s 3,000 pounds of cement per day – each truck 600 pounds!
So how do you get all that? The answer is: don’t. Build your patio with ready-made cement , which comes in 50 pound bags for about $15-$20 per bag – and lasts forever.
There are a lot of DIY projects that are certainly doable, though in practice none of them is easy. I’m talking about things like mixing your own concrete for a patio, or building a simple fence out of pallets, or laying your own swimming pool liner. They all seem like good ideas until you start to think about the consequences of failure.
Still, if you’re reading this blog you probably aren’t going to try any of these things. You’re probably more likely to be reading this blog because you have an old house and want some ideas for doing something now that will get you a new patio before summer comes again.
Well, the best way to get a new patio is to make one yourself with inexpensive materials and tools you can find at any big box store. If you have kids they’ll probably love helping, and it will give them real experience with basic carpentry skills they’ll be able to use later on. It’s also very inexpensive compared to buying a ready-made patio in most cities. And by the time the kids are grown and gone it can still be a wonderful place for relaxing with friends or family.
The first thing to do is to find a good cement that will accept the calcium chloride. The two most important properties are workability and hardness, so it should be easy to mix and work with. If you want a nice, smooth surface, you should use a mortar that has enough fines in it for the best texture possible.
The second step is to make sure you have some clean-looking rocks. If your rock is full of cracks and holes, it will look awful after you finish. It’s even possible to get rocks that are too smooth and polished, which would look terrible as well. This is a big mistake:
The third step is to find rocks that are small enough for you to fit them into your desired shape. You’ll need to have at least three different sizes: small ones for filling in gaps between joints, medium-sized ones for columns, and large ones for the main part of the patio.
The fourth step is to take the rocks and put them in your mixing bucket. You’ll want at least two buckets of water (the larger one should be added last), as well as some more rocks than you think you’ll need, though not all of them are going straight into your cement mixture — you want some residual water left in the
If you’ve got cement and a few tools, you can have a patio. It will be very basic, but it will still be a patio.
Every year the standard catalogues of materials for the home building industry come out. They are full of plans for making your house look like a million dollars . . . or at least like a million dollars more than yours did before you made it look like a million dollars. If you’re feeling flush, there’s even an “asterisk” page for people who are willing to spend more money to make their houses look even richer than they did before they spent more money to make them look richer than they did before they spent more money to make themselves rich by making their houses look richer than they had ever looked before (they would not say this aloud at parties, but the asterisk page was quite explicit).
Other companies do the same thing. The magazines and catalogues all tell you how to make your house look like something that isn’t really there—like something rich enough to be worth being rich. They tell you how to make it seem less real, less solid, less homey—and they call this “improvement.”
But those materials are not for you, unless you have millions of dollars and feel like
You could make this yourself, but it would take a lot of work. Or you could hire someone to do it for you, but that might be more expensive. In this case, you should think about what the best product is, and use that.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if there’s a proven product already available. Cement is a concrete made from sand, cement and water. It is used in walls and floors and roofs. There are cement products for sale everywhere; these are not DIY projects. For example:
YARD CONSTRUCTION*
Sewer Leak Repair*
Sidewalk Repair*
Curb Repairs & Replacement*
COURTYARD CLEAN UP**
TREAD REPAIR