We're horrible, horrible people and forgot to get some before pics. But really, in my defense, we hadn't really planned on putting in a patio when we started. It began as a weeding project...
To set the scene: You are at the top of the stairs going to the back yard (the bottom left corner of the pic). About 5 feet past the railing is a stone retaining wall, probably about 8-10 feet tall, which lands at the top edge of the back yard. The post in the middle is actually one of the support posts for our back porch.
Originally, this area was a horribly overgrown slope. We neglected that side of the house - too much ugly foliage, a large dirt pile from our driveway expansion, and it became our yard trash accumulation zone. One day this spring, I started weeding it out. It looked great! ~D and started chatting.
We've had plans for years of putting in a retaining wall at the bottom of the stairs to level out more of the backyard, but getting fill down there would be a logistical nightmare. So we decided to put in a small retaining wall here, and move the big pile of dirt the ten feet instead of all the way down the stairs. We scoped it out so we wouldn't be doing more than a two-foot tall wall.
And then we figured we'd put in a patio, maybe with a goal of having a place for a hot tub. Our back porch is kind of small for the grill and our patio table (just a 44" square with four chairs, but didn't really fit). This new space is about 300 square feet, about twice the size of the porch.
We got the wall built (pressure-treated, using this video for inspiration) and filled in. There were many posts dug, and we had to buy about twelve 60-pound bags of concrete, though we have a little bit leftover. We put in some pretty serious drainage, as the house's gutter drains at that corner. We sunk the drain to the wall, where it meets a perforated tube, and put in lots of gravel. I've perhaps been a little OCD about making sure that weeds won't be growing up through it: pulling everything before we filled in the wall, hitting it with Ortho Ground Clear, and giving it professional-grade landscape fabric. I better not see any Siberian irises or tiger lilies back there!
We knew we wanted a railing to keep the kids safe because, even though the wall is not high enough (I believe - make sure you check your own state's code!) to require a railing technically, it's also close enough to the big wall that we didn't want people falling over. So we picked out the metal tube-y balusters from Lowe's, which offers a contractor pack for about 20-24' worth.
Next came the paver decision. Ugh. Pavers are expensive, especially when you're doing 300 sf., unless you want the cheap, plain ones. I did find a place in Florida that offered very reasonable prices for fancy pavers, but shipping was going to be something like $7000. We decided we'd get the cheap gray pavers and a couple of different colors of concrete dye and paint them in different colors, in a random pattern - no checkboard!
Off to Home Depot we went. They had a great booklet for the Behr concrete dye system, which will, in theory, provide a more mottled surface. You apply one color unevenly, and then apply a second color, also unevenly. We also picked out some stain for the wood railings, which we were planning on doing with more pressure treated wood.
Fortunately, ~D works in the asphalt business, so we were able to save some money having his company deliver it to us. We ended up using about 2 1/2 tons, which gives us about a 2-3" base under the pavers.
It came time to decide on the pavers. I noticed that Home Depot had 4x8 bricks in gray as well as the 12x12s, so worked out a pattern I was happy with. But then I saw that they didn't have the gray in stock locally. I ordered them from Lowe's instead, with the in-store pickup. The different sizes were from different brands, and slightly different thicknesses, so they actually provide a lot of color variation even without the stain being applied yet. (Note: the in-store pickup was great! They had everything ready to load when ~D got there with the truck. It was already paid for, and we only got two duds out of the 700 total pieces that we bought).
I'll (hopefully) do some more descriptive posting for the various stages. But first I need to finish it! We got it functional before our big Fourth party, but it still needs some work. We need to dye it, stain the wood (which ended up being cedar), and install a light. The big hole where the dirt pile was needs to be graded and seeded. But the patio holds the new Weber grill, a cooler/grill station, and the table and chairs with plenty of room and comfort to spare!
