If you’re considering making your own backyard into an outdoor haven, you’re following time-tested patterns set by hardworking people in every nation. In Texas, we use the Spanish term patio to indicate a simply civilized backyard. Combining definitions from dictionaries like Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Collins, we find a patio to be an open-to-the-sky courtyard area, outside a house, with a solid floor capable of supporting furniture and used in good weather for recreation, relaxing, lounging, dining or the like.
Depending upon the design of your home and its pre-existing landscaping, your dream patio may involve multiple seating areas connected by pathways. Or maybe, it will be just one great, big area that will become your family’s favorite place to hang out whether the stars are twinkling or the sun is shining.
If your inner artist needs an outlet, challenge yourself to be a do-it-yourselfer. You will have a ball planning a patio. And the big ball we call Earth has provided you with an unlimited supply of resources to rearrange the look, feel and utility of your backyard.
Whether you desire a modern, straight-edge look; an old-fashioned, cobble-stone effect; or an all-natural, wavy feel, you’ll find the instructions and materials you need from local stone and rock suppliers, online garden stores and nationwide big-box businesses. Prepare to gather a sizable list of tools and materials:
• gloves
• 2x4x48-inch board
• tape measure
• level
• rubber mallet
• sand
• pea gravel
• tamper or plate compactor, a machine that compresses gravel and different kinds of soils
• rake
• push broom
• safety glasses
• sunglasses
• studs
• garden hose
• shovel
• trowel
• electrical conduit
• wet tile saws and blades
• ready mix concrete
• garden stakes
• masonry
• mortar
• knee pads
• travertine, concrete or stone pavers
Though some might wish to scour the West Texas countryside to bring home red rock for making cottage-style walls, they’re heavy, lumpy and ill-suited for laying a solid, flat patio. The best bet is buying pre-manufactured patio pavers made from concrete, which cost between $8-$20 per square foot.
Another option is using patio paver molds. They will keep your overall cost down. One mold runs between $30-$70, depending upon the complexity of the style you choose, and you’ll invest only in raw concrete plus tools. Even novices can pour home-mixed cement into molds that allow you to be übercreative, since you can add marbles, seashells or colors to your concrete.
There are even recycled rubber pavers available now, which make creativity limitless. Each textured, anti-slip panel can be cut to the size and shape you desire with a utility knife, and installation simply requires a rubber mallet because, in fact, you can use rubber pavers right on top of sod, and it’s not recommended to use rubber pavers on sand or gravel, unlike the stone and cement pavers.
But if that more permanent, natural and even vintage look is what you want, then stone or cement is what you need. And that will take more effort. You’ll have to remove about 6 inches of sod, and then level the ground, spread a 4-inch layer of gravel for the paver base and then a 1-inch layer of paver sand before you add the 2-inch-thick patio pavers.
Sound like a lot of toil? In fact, Rudyard Kipling spoke of such labor in his poem “The Glory of the Garden,” first published in 1911:
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner In the Glory of the Garden.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
Written by Melissa Rawlins
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