Part 1: Follow the yellow brick road....

I've been singing that song all day because we started our brick walkway! On Friday, my dad and I finally managed to get to the brick store and came home with these:



220 pretty bricks all for me! We scored an awesome deal as well - they are what you call "seconds", bricks that didn't pass muster for whatever reason so they were only $0.40 a brick! That's half the price of the ones we were originally going to buy. Yay! You probably wouldn't want to build a house with these, but they work perfect for our purposes.

I was so excited, I was up at 8:00 AM this morning. On a Saturday. To lay bricks. My hubby, J, thought I was crazy and understandably stayed in bed with the dogs. But not me! My dad came over around 8:15 to drop off some tools and get me started.

Step 1 was completed 2 weekends ago which was to clear the existing sod and weeds from the area where I wanted the walkway. We ended up covering the area with landscaping fabric to ensure that no new weeds would grow while we waited to get the materials for the next step.

So I started with Step 2 this morning - removing some of the excess dirt so that our bricks would lay flush with the existing cement boundaries of the driveway & path to the front door. The dirt was somewhat loosely packed, so I used a flat shovel to shift the dirt into our wheelbarrow. Occasionally I needed to use the pointy shovel to loosen up some bits. When I was done, it looked like this:
That's my dad unscrewing a sprinkler head & capping it off. No need to water our walkway!

Step 3 was to prep the area for screeding (not sure if you can turn that noun into a verb, but I just did). First, we lay the bricks out in a row to see how many we would need for our desired path size (about 3 feet). Then we dug out a trench down the side and popped in a 2x4. This will provide a frame for our walkway as we lay the brick and is used with the screed. We only had to do this on one side of the path since we were using the flower bed border as our frame on the other side. The 2x4 was stuck in place with shims to keep it from moving.

Step 4 - the screed! This was fun. A screed is a board used to even off the surface of the dirt. It has notches cut out on either side so it can slide down the tops of the frame (in our case the 2x4 and the cement edging) and level the dirt, removing any excess and filling any hollows. Here's me screeding (yes grammar police, I did it again):


Step 5 was compacting the dirt. This was fun too. We basically just thumped around on the ground, packing the dirt with our feet.


Step 6 - BRICKS! This is the super time consuming part. Even though we screed, the uniqueness of each brick means we need to adjust the dirt underneath each one to ensure it is level on all sides as well as with our frame. We get to use super fun rubber mallets to pound the bricks into submission (ie: compact the dirt underneath). It's the perfect task for perfectionists like me. I get to use three different levels and obsess about how each individual brick is laying in relation to its neighbors. We spent about 2 hours on this part before I had to call it a day and we only got about 1/3 of the bricks laid. Here is our path as it looks now:
I think it already looks pretty amazing! After we get all the bricks laid, we'll get sand and sweep it into all the little cracks and crevices to help keep the bricks from shifting too much as we walk on them. So hopefully I'll have a finished brick walkway to share in the next few weeks (it's supposed to start raining tomorrow so I'm not sure when I'll be able to finish up). Then it will be on to the next project: more brick walkways! Haha. But now that I have the know-how I'm feeling pretty confident that the whole process will move a little more quickly.

Thanks to my dad for spending so much time teaching me today! I had a lot of fun and am super excited to have learned a new skill!