Categories: HOME IMPROVEMENT

Laying Pavers into a 12 Foot Circle

On December 2nd and 3rd of 2007 Pacific County in Washington State was hit with a hurricane which lasted for 30 hours. Winds reached speeds of 150 miles an hour and there was massive flooding. It was called The Hundred Year Storm. I was in the middle of this working on a house in Raymond, Washington during the storm.

A wicker gazebo suffered massive destruction as a result of this storm. It ended up in the neighbors yard. The insurance company wrote it off as a total loss. I was asked to build a new gazebo to replace it.

My friend who owned the gazebo purchased a cedar kit which was put together by an Amish company www.homeplacestructures.com . I found the kit was well assembled and the directions were easy to follow and all the pieces fit together well.

I needed to put together a hard surface to anchor this new structure to. My friend purchased a set of pavers which were pre-cut to form a 12 foot circle consisting of 10 rings.

The pavers were delivered and I helped hand unload them onto the back lawn near where the gazebo was going to be. I read the directions to understand the order that the pavers had to be laid. The pavers were cut at a slightly different angle for each ring. Some rings just needed more pavers and the outside rings actually used a combinati8on of different size stones to make the ring work.

I decided to just lay out the pavers on the lawn about ten feet from where they were actually going to be installed to understand the order and size of the final project.

Once I had all the pavers laid out I needed to dig out the lawn so that I there was room enough to pour a 4 inch thick slab of concrete and the thickness of the pavers. It also had to be level.

By measuring the pavers that were laid out on the lawn I knew I would need a slab that was just over 12 feet in diameter. Using some pipe I made a makeshift compass to mark where the edge of the circle would be.

Since the pavers were 2 inches thick and allowing for the thickness of the mortar I needed the hole to be six and a half inches deeper than the level I wanted the finished surface to be.

I picked the lowest spot in the lawn and drove in a stake so that the top of it was two inches and a half inches lower than where I wanted the surface of the pavers to end up. This would mark the top of where the form would be for pouring the concrete slab. I then dug holes and pounded stakes in so that the tops of them were level with the top of this first stake. The stakes were approximately two foot long.

Once I had all these stakes driven in at the proper height I took half inch plywood and ripped it on my table saw in four inch strips. I dug out the area between the stakes so that I could bend and fasten the strips to the stakes. I used two layers of plywood so I had two rings which made the form for the concrete.

Once the forms were in place my friend couldn’t believe it was level because she was comparing it to the ground around it. She was concerned it would end up looking like it was in a hole. tapering the ground around it to the form solved this problem..

I had some help removing the dirt inside the form. The cement truck came and I was totally unprepared for how much work it would be to level out the 4 inch thick by twelve foot diameter slab. Fortunately the truck driver helped me with that and we got it poured and leveled. If I had to do it again I would definitely get someone to help me.

The next several days it rained which isn’t too uncommon in Washington State so I had to keep covering the slab with plastic.

About a week later it was finally dry enough to start mortaring the pavers to the slab. There were two pieces of stone in the very center ring which when placed together had eight sides. They made an octagon shape. The second ring had eight pavers and the third ring had 16 pavers.

One of the things that I soon discovered was that when I tapped the pavers into the mortar to make them level the mortar would force up between the pavers driving them apart. I solved this problem by dry laying the next ring in place and using it to keep the ring tight. I also discovered that mortaring every other paver helped keep them from moving as well.

It took me several tries to just get the first three rings mortared so that they were level and tight. I then dry laid the forth ring to keep them tight as the mortar set up. It took me about two weeks to get all the rings installed. Part of the problem was it kept wanting to rain

On the last two rings I had to actually cut them on a wet saw to make them fit. I was used to using a wet saw when I worked at Home Depot and Lowe’s. I had to buy a small wet saw to make two cuts.

This is a project that was a little challenging but very satisfying.