The hard landscaping of our top patio has pretty much been unchanged since we moved into our place back in 2005. The paving is composed of mainly thick concrete paving slabs and bricks arranged to a pattern. It's not the most elegant nor impressive of materials but they were laid solidly, aged well, and served the purpose. Having just moved into this property then, the priority for both budget and time was to sort out the house rather than the hard landscaping of the top patio. It wasn’t broke so why fix it?
As it was until last weekend
Through the years it had been playing in our heads to eventually upgrade the paving to real stone. But as it wasn’t changed early on, the patio has since filled with plants and pots as we also carried on sorting the rest of the garden.
It would be wonderful if we were to change the paving to all stone now (a herringbone pattern would be nice!). But the idea of shifting all those pots to one side and having to deal with the mess and disruption for months on end didn't sound appealing either. Plus you put all that stone down only to cover more than half of it in pots seemed counterproductive. So we decided on a compromise...
Instead of lifting and changing everything, we'll concentrate on the pathway of the existing layout instead. With a little dose of creativity, we opted to use mix shades of sandstone to replace concrete paving slabs along the pathway, laid out to look random and planned at the same time.
We already have a plan for the old slabs but that will be revealed in due course :)
It'll be a relatively easier job to do this way, with only having to lift a few paving slabs at a time and not having to shift so many pots along the way. It should give the patio a bit of an upgrade and provide extra interest.
It's a work in progress at the moment and we’ll post photos once the work is finished, fixing what ain’t broken.
Mark :-)
