MehI stretched them from the tree bench to the garden in a rectangle pattern.
That’s betterI finally settled on a triangle shape with the base of the triangle closest to the garden and the point closest to the tree. After I had all the bricks in a triangle shape, I bought a few pieces of flagstone to increase the size of the seating area. A friend of mine stopped by to help me load some sod that I was going to take to her house. She looked at my patio-to-be and asked, ‘Is that supposed to be a heart? It looks like a heart.’ I looked at the bricks and said, ‘Well, yes, evidently it is!’ So, decision made – the patio would be in a heart shape!
Prepping the areaSince the area where this patio is being constructed is level, I chose not to remove the sod. Besides, by this time, since the bricks had been on the grass for a few weeks, the grass below and around them had already started to die from lack of sunlight and water. I figured with the weight of the bricks and sand & rocks I would be adding, the grass would not be an issue. So, I left the grass in place. To ‘kill off’ the grass between the bricks & flagstone, I used a mixture of white vinegar, dawn dish soap, and salt and applied it with a garden sprayer.
Weed barrierNow that the grass was pretty brown, it was time to create the patio. Even though the grass was brown and I’d be placing sand, rock & brick on it, I still chose to put down a weed/grass barrier. I had some brown paper grocery bags, newspaper & also landscape cloth on hand. I didn’t have a lot of landscape cloth so I started with that and when I ran out, moved onto using the newspaper then the bags. When using paper bags or newspaper as a weed barrier, you will want to wet them down after placing them on the ground. Wetting the paper will help it stay in place while you work; especially if it’s windy.
Laying the bricksI started at the tip of the heart and worked my way to the larger section. Since I wanted to keep the design, I picked up a few bricks/flagstone at a time, laid down the weed barrier, covered it with sand, and then laid the bricks/flagstone back in place, shifting them as needed to keep the heart shape.
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