Hey there folks! Some of you may have noticed that a post hasn’t gone up in TWO whole weeks!!

I don’t have much of an excuse for this past Saturday, but last Saturday we were celebrating the life of Todd’s grandmother who passed away. Thank you to those that reached out to myself and Todd to offer condolences on his Nana’s passing. We truly appreciate all of the words.

Everyone reacts differently to death and in this case, both Todd and I were affected in a similar way. We both realized how short life is. That we’re living life right now, this is it.

So in order to get living we decided to focus our energy on something we’ve been wanting to do for over two months now. Build our freaking fire pit!

Truthfully, this project turned out to be way more work than I originally thought it would be. But with Todd, everything has to be perfect (and I’m so grateful after the project is over that we did everything the right way, but while we’re doing it I’m bitching and complaining about how long everything takes to do it right.)

We’re 90% done with our patio and fire pit area which means it’s “done enough” to start enjoying it and sharing here on the blog!

I found myself googling how to build a patio multiple times before we started this project. Even though Todd totally already knows what he’s doing, I didn’t and wanted to be familiar with what we were getting ourselves into… WELL, let me tell you this project was a doozy. Especially because we wound up doing the majority of the work in the middle of a heat wave (hence why we have a canopy set up in most of the pictures! I do not do well in heat and direct sun.)

Below I’ll go over step by step what we did to build our patio and fire pit area. I urge you to do more research than just what I tell you here, because again, I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to this hardscaping stuff. But I am pretty proud of the results and we both feel like this patio area will last for years to come! Which is a good thing because we plan on keeping this little fixer upper for a good long time!

Before I show you step by step how to build a patio, here’s a quick recap for those new around these parts of the blog.

We’re currently living in a property that was a HUD home (if you don’t know what HUD is, check out this post I wrote all about HUD homes.) It actually wasn’t in the plans to purchase a house for us to move into (yet) but because this fixer upper has an apartment above the garage we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to purchase a multifamily property for less than the cost of a single!

We fixed up the apartment, rented it out, fixed up the house and moved in! We’re still remodeling and currently in the process of adding a master suite to the second floor and plan on renting the house out within a few years and moving onto something with more land! That’s my plan anyway, we’ll see what the universe has in store.

 

How We Did it | How to Build a Patio

Our patio area is no where near perfect but we can’t complain. It cost us just about $150 to do the entire patio area!! Score!

We also scored on our furniture because we found the entire set on sale for $200! That includes two chairs, a coffee table and a love seat! After the non-refundable purchase we found a very small “557” written in white chalky ink that won’t come off of one of the cushions… but I’ll take that for $200 (and keep my fingers crossed it’ll eventually wear off.)

How to Build a Patio Step 1

First we figured out how big we wanted our final patio area to be. We chose a 12’x12′ pad because, well, I don’t know. It looked like a good size.

After we figured out the size and where to put the patio we squared up the 12’x12′ pad and hammered pins into each corner. We double checked 111 times to make sure it was square and then we used a string line and tied it around the pins to give us a well defined line to dig to.

How to Build a Patio Step 2

Then we dug up the top layer of sod and using our grading level, dug out the dirt until the entire pad was level. Guys, the grading level we used had such a loud beeping noise on it we wound up duct taping over the speaker! It was almost unbearable and I felt incredibly bad if any of the neighbors were home and had to constantly listen to it.

Other than the beeping, the grading level made things so easy and I highly recommend getting one or renting one if you want to do some grading! It took us about 2 and half nights after work of digging and hauling the dirt around the property to fill in low spots and the ginormous hole that was once a pond, but we finally got the sod and dirt removed enough to start laying sand.

How to Build a Patio Step 3

Whew. But first we took a break.

Next, we laid a foundation of paver sand and using the grading level made sure we were spreading it evenly. But we quickly realized it made more sense to lay the slate as we poured the sand because some pieces were thicker than others!

The differing thicknesses of the slate made it a lot more difficult to level the slate with one another! We wound up going one slate piece at a time and leveling from one piece of slate to the next… which thankfully worked out at the end.

I did have my doubts, but it all worked out beautifully.

How to Build a Patio Step 4

After we laid the slate we rinsed it off for a couple reasons. First, I wanted to get the excess sand off the slate and I thought that was the easiest/best way to go about it. And second, we wanted the sand to compact a little before we filled in the spaces between the slate pieces.

How to Build a Patio Step 5

Then we filled in all the spaces between the slate with a pretty small white rock. Wanna hear a fun story about how we got all the rock for our patio for under $12? Of course you do! We went to Lowe’s on July 4th and there was a guy there who just wanted to get off work for the night so he could be with his family (my words not his… his were more like “so I can get piss drunk” but I like to think he might have a soft spot for hanging with his family as well.)

Anyway, he told us that we could take all the torn and broken bags for 50% off. Well, he gave us 50% bags that had less than a finger hole in it just because he didn’t feel like moving them! He said we were doing him a favor by taking the last of them so he could clean up the pallet.  Score again!

So then we poured the white rock into all the spaces between the slate, packed them down into the sand and leveled them off to be even with the slate!

While the whole process took us just under two weeks to finish, we are so happy with the outcome and even happier with the $150 it costs us to have a beautiful patio to enjoy fires on!

We saved the most money on slate because it was already on the property when we bought it so it was FREE! Better yet, we wanted to move it at some point anyway because the previous owner laid the slate on top of dirt and tree roots to make a quick patio area but the tree roots have grown since then, like a lot. So needless to say, their slate patio was looking a little run down and a lot uneven. I think it looks a little better now, wouldn’t you agree?

Thanks for reading this post on how to built a patio! I’ll have to do another post on how we created privacy for our fire pit area… so maybe you’ll have to subscribe so you don’t miss it!

And if you missed some of my other most popular posts here are a few of our reader favorites!

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