Front Entry Path, Installed

The first big implementation of this year’s yard project is done. I put in a paver path on Saturday.

As a refresher, here’s how this area used to look:

A photo of the front entry of our house from before this year. There's a bed with shrubs blocking the view to the front steps of the house and the walkway across the front of the house.

And after moving the large shrubs:

A photo of the same front entry in late winter after removing the large shrubs. The front porch and steps are easily visible now.

And now:

A photo of the front entry with the newly laid paver walkway curving from the driveway to the front porch steps.

Prep work

The first thing I did was walk the area with Megan to determine the outside line of the path. Then I weed eated (weed ate?) the grassy section and raked out the bed section to get as close as possible to bare dirt.

That was a few weeks ago. Weather and weekend schedules kept delaying me, but everything cleared up this week.

I made four trips over three days to the county free mulch pile on Memorial. This is the yard waste the county collects and then mulches/quick composts and sets out for county residents to use for free.

On the upside, it is free. On the downside, it was kind of trashy. If trash gets in with the yard waste, it gets shredded with everything else. This batch had lots of shredded bits of plastic bags. And the site itself got trashier as the week went on as others left rubber gloves, food trash, etc. I was disappointed in that.

I used the county mulch to level out the path, filling in dips and leveling out the slope a touch. I know this is not as solid as a proper paver base, but, long term, we may reconfigure the front steps to our house, which would move the path. I wanted to make sure the soil would be in good condition if that happens. Worse case, we like the path here, and we install a more permanent version.

In the meantime, if I need to adjust some pavers that settle a little too deep or anything like that, I will.

Paver installation

That left everything ready to lay pavers on Saturday.

I wanted a 2-inch gap between pavers, three columns, and wanted to try keeping rows aligned, fanning out the spacing as it goes through the curve.

I placed the outside line first, aligned with my outside line. I tried laying the curve next to figure that part out, but, keeping two inches between each column pushed the inside column further in than I expected.

I ended up doing a lot more by eye than I expected. Fanning out the spacing on the curve ended up leaving much too large of gaps on the outside, so I abandoned keeping each row aligned. I placed the columns with two inch gaps, and then went back and visually adjusted things to look aligned. I added an extra paver to the middle column and two more to the outer column. They line up at the driveway and again as the path straightens out towards the house.

The geometry was harder than I expected, but getting the pavers was hardest. It took four trips to get all that I needed. I didn’t feel comfortable loading the van down with more than about 20, and I wasn’t exactly sure how many I needed. I would buy a load, lay them, and repeat.

The one thing I would’ve done different is marking the outside line on a contour line instead of walking out some kind of ideal path. Our walked-out path dipped down before going up again to the house. Following a contour line would have reduced the amount of filler mulch needed.

I filled in the gaps with pine bark mulch.

Next steps

Now that the perennials are popping up, my plan is to move those to nursery pots next, and then measure and map the area.