After a few design iterations (which you can see on the left), we ended up with a more modern, rectangular design, and decided to use all Techo Bloc for our hot tub enclosure, seating walls, pavers, and accents. For the space to be large enough and meet our client’s needs, we settled on roughly 510 square feet of paver space.
With the soft spots out of the way, we finished our paver base. We compacted the base soil and spread out thick geotextile fabric to separate the soil from our stone. Easy insurance to protect our stone base! As we built out the base; we also installed the first course of Techo Bloc Mini-Creta wall to hold the base in place. Because of the way the grade fell away from the house, we started with about 5″ of stone base and ended up with around 13″ against the back of our wall. As the stone was installed, every couple inches we compact the it with a plate compactor to make sure we built a solid foundation for our construction. We added three sleeves into our stone base. We needed a sleeve for the gas to the fire pit, one for outdoor kitchen, and one for our electrical and landscape lighting on the far side of the patio.
Back to our patio: the first course of Techo Bloc Mini-Creta wall was installed. We also leveled and installed our 770 pound Techo Bloc Rocka steps. Not an easy feat! But we were now ready to install our pavers: Techo Bloc Eva pavers in Shale Grey. These are an awesome paver with a bit of stone texturing. To accent the pavers, wall, and our Rocka steps, we installed Techo Bloc Antika pavers in Onyx Black around the stairs, exit to the river, and the gas fire pit. The goal was to break up any monotony of the pavers while adding additional texture and color.
As we built and laid out each step of the hardscape, we made sure to run our landscape lighting wire throughout the space. One of our final steps before we glued our caps into place was to attach and wire the LED landscape lights into the transformer. As you can see from the pictures, these accent the space beautifully. We used all low-voltage fixtures run from a single transformer with a WiFi controller. Thanks to this technology, the whole system is controlled directly from our clients phone.
We removed all the lawn with a sod cutter before planting. Due to the poor soil mentioned earlier, we had to heavily amend the area with a pure, sifted compost. During this process, we also tilled gypsum and calcitic lime into the soil. After all our planting was completed, we used plenty of Delaware Rock (or grey chalet) to accent the curves and remaining steep transitions in the landscape. Finally, we mulched with a brown dyed, double-shredded hardwood. Any areas that our machines ran over repeatedly, we aerated and seeded.
After the initial patio was completed, we were invited back two years later to expand the space. We worked with River Pools to install an M35.