Outdoor paving

 Earlier this year, I explored some of the things you can DIY easily and safely without learning advanced skills or compromising your home insurance. Today, I was inspired to share some projects where I have collaborated with others who started out as unskilled as myself, namely outdoor paving.

While going through some of my mom's photos of the house that I grew up in, I found one that brought back memories of seemingly endless weekends working side by side with my dad. We had a very long and narrow plot, with the house at the far end from the road, and a winding earth track with a "middelmannetjie" of wild grass growing in the centre. Our project started quite modestly, simply to put down some paving outside the new garage doors to provide a hard-standing for our weekend car cleaning ritual. The project soon escalated, and ended up with much of the earth track being replaced with brickwork.

The driveway looking towards the street

We had chosen paving bricks for the project. These are similar in size to a conventional brick, but slightly thinner and with a smoother surface top and bottom. As we were doing the project ourselves, we decided to loose-lay them on a bedding of builders' sand rather than setting them in to a cement screed. We started by levelling off all the bumps and filling the depressions - here, a long straight roofing timber was very handy, as some of these irregularities were not obvious to the naked eye. This piece of timber became our most valued piece of equipment for the project, 5 x 10cm in cross section and about 3 metres in length. The driveway had a natural slope for its entire length, so we did not have to worry about water pooling in the middle of the paving - it simply ran down towards the street.

The next step was to put down a layer of builders' sand about 4 to 5 cm thick, which we levelled and smoothed with our piece of timber. We did this in strips of about 30cm so that we were not standing or kneeling on the sand, as this has to remain quite loose and un-compacted. My dad and I would start from the centre and work outwards, placing the bricks and tapping them into place with rubber mallets. We had picked up the paver bricks cheaply and found that they were quite irregular and banana-shaped, so we did not worry too much about making straight lines, but were more concerned to keep the spaces between bricks as small as possible.

When we got to the end of a row, we dug a trench just wide enough for a brick on its side, and packed these edging bricks in with dry grout, a mixture of one part of cement to four parts of sand. We used this same mix to spread over the bricks we had laid each day, brushing the grout into the small spaces between and watering the paving with a fine spray to dampen the grout and activate the cement. We did this for each day's work to stabilise the paving, as the driveway was still in use throughout the time we did the project.

Just a couple of years later, I took on another paving project, this time a solo effort. In building the new garage, a courtyard about 6 x 6 metres was created, directly outside my bedroom window. I set to work designing a very self-conscious layout, as can be expected from a second-year architecture student!

A view of my bedroom window from the courtyard

As the entire area was just backfill of builders' rubble from the garage construction, I decided to keep planting to a minimum, as I would have to dig out some of the rubble to level up with enough topsoil to get anything to grow. One of the quadrants of the design was a rectangular fishpond, the last of many that my mom commissioned for this house. Because the ground level in the courtyard was almost completely flat, I needed to be sure to grade the paving to a slope. I also needed to be sure that the finished ground levels of paving and planting were below the indoor floor levels, so that there would not be rising damp in the walls. I used the same technique as we used for the driveway, laying the paving bricks on a bedding layer of builders' sand and brushing dry grout in to the joints, but here I set the edging bricks into a proper wet cement mix for additional strength.

Many years later, I had some other adventures into brick paving, in a very different setting, and with a new set of design intentions as, by then, I was concerned with sustainable stormwater solutions. I had been invited to work with a group of residents and a community-based organisation in the informal settlement of Diepsloot to see if we could come up with ways of managing surface waste-water and rainwater in the narrow lanes that were experiencing severe erosion. We hit upon the idea of using broken bricks that we could get for free from the brick recyclers in the area. 

The paved lane served as a venue for street theatre

For this project, we ran a brick soak-away down the centre of the lane, as the ground levels had been worn down to a natural channel and we wanted to direct the water away from the dwellings. This would allow much of the surface water to percolate into the aquifer below the surface, becoming purified as it passed through the soak-away. The paving on either side of this channel was finished with the same dry-grout technique that my dad and I had used when I was a teenager. 

The use of half-bricks had a number of social and environmental advantages: as a material with absolutely no resale value, we could be fairly sure it would not be "repurposed" elsewhere; and as a waste material, we were up-cycling it and preventing it from becoming landfill or worse! It also works very well for the kind of low-volume and non-motorised traffic (pedestrian and cycles) as the half-bricks perform similar to cobblestones, but create a smoother surface.