The Patio: Shapes and Forms

Monday, I shared with you the process of destroying the wheelchair ramp and concrete walkway off the back porch of the house in order to make way for our new patio. Today, I want to show you the next step in the patio process.

However, I will warn you now, Joey did the majority of this work during a point in time when I was not home. Hence, there are very few pictures of the process - mostly just "after" pictures - but you're super smart. I'm sure you'll get the right idea...

So, with just dirt and the old concrete steps remaining, we had to decide exactly what shape this new patio would take so that Joey could set up boards (aka forms) around the perimeter to hold in the concrete.

We knew we wanted the patio to fill in the space between the porch and the garage, but the question was how far out to take it into the tiny back/side yard of the house? And how do we make it meet up with the driveway so that we can walk from the back porch to the driveway without cutting through the grass? And Do we want the sides nice and straight? Or kinda curvy?

Well, we went with kinda curvy along the grass line. Something like this below. It gives the patio a softer shape and should look more interesting in the end.


The rest of the patio is pretty square with it wrapping around between the porch and garage. The forms are taken out once the concrete is poured. So, Joey put them in place just to get the right shape. Then he filled in the area with gravel for a foundation. The gravel was delivered to the house in a big truck (I missed that part). Here's a nice action shot of Joey raking the gravel around (clearly my camera doesn't do "action" shots)...


Joey also decided to put a drain in front of the entrance to the garage - just to make sure rain water didn't pool in that area and leak under the door or something. Tubes coming out from the sides of the drain will just run under the concrete and into the yard. Free water system for our grass!


Once all the gravel was spread around, Joey laid out orange wire mesh over the whole surface. It came in a big roll and he just cut it to size and laid it down.


Below you can see some of the curvy-ness of the forms leading to the driveway along with wire mesh over the gravel...



Next up? Pouring concrete. This was the fun action part that I actually got to see in person (yeah, I was no help) and take pictures of the process (which I'm sure the men working greatly appreciated)! Stay tuned.