My mother lives in a retirement community and she has a beautiful entrance to her home with a stone walkway. After seing her home and how nice it looked, I decided to use in on my new home as well. Stone walkways are a wonderful way to incorporate the element of brick and stones around the home. They are not only functional, but are aestheticilly pleasing to the eye. They can cover up worn out pathways, or can provide a clean looking walkway or even add a decorative finish to your driveway. You can also use them to create a garden walkway or can be used to outline a courtyard or can be used as a retaining wall or even around the front yard as a tree surround with flowers and plants for a really decorative finish to your front lawn.
Once you decide on what you are looking for you can do it yourself or hire a professional to do the job for you. You can build a simple stone pathway by getting stones in the bush and laying them yourself. I got three quotes from prospective stone interlock installers and decided to have it done for me as I find that a qualified professional installer would inevitably do a better job than I could. There is a bit of an art to doing a nice job and I don't want to have to do it over again if it is not done right. |
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When the workers started the job they dug out all the surrounding sod and soil to get the stone walkway started. Once they dug down enough, they used a tamper to tamp down the earth and then used crushed fine stone as a base for the walkway so that they had something to use as a leveling point to keep the stones level and solid in the ground without moving. I don't know how they did it, but the stone was leveled exactly to the edge of my laneway so the stones were exactly at the right height as the laneway. Then they created a curved walkway to the steps to my house. The total labour for my job was about 30 hours as they showed up each night to work the job in stages. |
I also had the installers also edge my laneway and build a curved stone surround around my tree in the front yard so I could put in flowers and plants. When the job was finished, I couldn't believe how nice the whole job looked and how it improved the look of my property. It makes all the difference in the world to have a professional installer do the job instead of myself, because I just don't think I could have done anywhere near as nice a job. They also guarenteed the work on my stone walkway for two years which gives me peace of mind if anything goes wrong with any movement it may have.
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