Picture-perfect Paths & Patios

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Unless your installation is tiny, and your soil sandy, you’ll probably need mechanical help excavating for the foundation. The best machine to hire for this job is a mini-excavator. These look like their full-size cousins, but are less than one-quarter the weight and are highly maneuverable in tight places. When you make arrangements for the machine and operator to work, ask if the excavator can be fitted with a toothless bucket. This is better than the standard toothed bucket, which loosens the soil at the bottom of the trench but is unable to scoop all the soil out cleanly. The best mini-excavators also have rubber tracks that won’t mar lawns or driveways.

Before you break sod, you’ll need to create obvious visual guides for the machine operator to follow. To mark straight lines, you can’t beat string tied to 12-inch spikes hammered into the earth. For curves, lay garden hose on the ground. Since the purpose of these lines is to guide the excavation, lay them 1 foot outside the final dimensions of your installation. This extra width creates a foundation space wide enough to support the all-important plastic edging and leaves some extra room to work. To determine the actual width of the finished installation for layout purposes, lay some pavers out on the ground temporarily in your chosen pattern, then measure the group. Don’t leave any gaps between bricks — a sufficient gap for sand will automatically appear. Crisp, precise bricks naturally have small sand gaps. The rounded corners and edges of tumbled brick will create wider gaps. When you’ve got your strings and hoses where you want them, follow them as a guide as you spray a swath of white or yellow paint directly on the ground. Remove the strings or hose afterward so they don’t get tangled up in the excavator.

When your excavation reaches its final depth, move foundation material into the area and rake it around, but don’t get carried away. Apply no more than a 4-inch depth of fill in any one spot before hammering it down with the compactor. If you apply more than this in one place, compaction might not penetrate all the way through the loose layer. Your completed path or patio could still settle unevenly. I recommend four passes of the compactor — two lengthwise and two across the area — to do a thorough job. Keep adding, raking and compacting material until you’re within an inch of the finished height of the foundation layer.

Now’s the time to install strings and spikes along the inside edges of the foundation, to act as a visual guide while you bring the foundation layer up to final height. Until now, your layout work has involved only the horizontal, left-and-right locations of edges. But now you also need to consider the vertical elevation of the foundation layer as it approaches its final height. This is especially important for wide installations like patios and driveways. Although the surface of the foundation doesn’t entirely dictate the final position of the pavers, it is helpful to get it as smooth and even as possible.

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