The price of beauty.

Making the Beauty

Repaving the back patio was a project my husband and I took on two summers ago.  The goal of this project was to continue the brick patio from the side yard around to the back of the house and then create a plant bed around that patio.  That summer, I spent hours and hours acquiring old bricks by digging them out of the ivy in our back yard or finding reasonably priced ones on craigslist.  By the fall, we finally had enough—over two thousand!

Because we were using old bricks each one was slightly different in color, shape, and size.  The project took up several full weekends spent on our hands and knees laying and leveling bricks one at a time.  It was exhausting, but in the end extremely satisfying and definitely a vast improvement from that concrete slab.  Many people (including my husband) thought I was crazy to spend all that time laying old worn bricks, but to me the patio’s beauty resulted in it looking timeless, like it had been there since the house was built.

1. We started with a blank, cracked concrete slab.

2. Here is the patio in progress, we added about 15 inches to the depth and extended it to meet the side brick patio.

3. The patio two seasons after completion.

Paying the Price

A blank concrete slab might be ugly, but it doesn’t require maintenance.  A brick patio on the other hand, needs to be tended to—just like a garden.  Although my patio doesn’t require regular watering, it needs weeding, washing, and already in just two years more sand to fill the sinking cracks.  Needless to say, I’m beginning to realize the insanity of replacing a solid slab of concrete containing only one crack with two thousand bricks containing thousands of cracks between them…leaving thousands of opportunities for weeds to grow!

So, after returning from a week away (which was also a week with a lot of rain), I decided to be more proactive about the weeding. This weekend I took a small test spot on the bricks and applied a vinegar & water solution (mostly vinegar).  Vinegar is a well-known natural weed killer.  It is mostly acetic acid, which not only burns vegetation but can effect the pH balance of soil, making it difficult for weeds to grow back.  I tried a test spot before applying it to the entire patio, just to see if the vinegar would make any difference in the prevention of future weeds, so check back in a few weeks for my results.

Patio after my rain-filled vacation last week:

Concluding Thoughts

Ultimately, I still believe the price is worth it.  The maintenance sounds worse than it really is.  This weekend I weeded the entire patio, applied some vinegar to one section, and brushed some fresh sand into the cracks in just over an hour’s time.

The results: a brand new, old looking patio!