Fighting the Rain, but getting it Done!
Over the last month, we’ve been fighting through the rainy conditions to complete as much work as possible. One project we got started was for Upper Allen Township. This project consists of plantings surrounding a water basin. As you can expect, working at this job is difficult due to the amount of rain we’ve had in the last month. We’ve only spent a few work days at the job so far, but have planted nearly 500 perennials, 50 shrubs, and 50 trees. Along with these plantings we have seeded an area of the basin. Since the weather hasn’t been cooperating for this job, we completed a paver job for a homeowner in New Cumberland. For this job, we needed to reset all of the existing pavers, due to them settling over time. Also, we were to add new drains to the patio to prevent this from happening again. This project was a raised patio, so we were led to believe that the settlement occurred because the water had nowhere to drain. This project ended up being difficult in various ways. One of these ways was keeping the order of how the pavers were laid. To prevent cutting and running short on pavers, we needed to stack the pavers in a way where we could remember how each one was set. In saying this, we knew we had to complete the resetting of the pavers by section, instead of ripping up everything at once. We started at one end of the patio where the cuts had occurred. Most of the areas needed additional bedding layer material. Adding the drains consisted of digging into the existing stone, then we ran PVC pipe to the end of the retaining wall, so the water would collect and deposit outside of the wall. After resetting the whole 500 square foot patio, we used a plate tamper with a rubber bottom to compact all the pavers that were reset. Following this we added polymeric sand, which stabilizes the pavers from moving. After the sweeping of the poly sand, we ran our blower across the patio to remove excess poly sand. The final touch was watering down the patio to wet down the sand, which stabilizes the pavers. Here’s a before and after picture of the job!
