Natural Stone Flooring under Pergola

After two exhausting days of digging sod, two injured backs, two days of hauling stone and one day of shoveling dirt... THE PERGOLA FLOOR IS [almost] DONE.

The only thing left to do is a small area in front of our gate, which shouldn't take too long this weekend IF we can find more rock.

THE BEST PART? 

This project was done  FOR FREE.  ZIP. ZERO.  NO MONEY SPENT.

As I've been saying we have collected rock every sunday morning for the past several months and we have two compost bins... meaning... we make our own dirt.

The project itself was very easy.
Don't get me wrong... it required quite a bit of muscle, but no technical skills.

Are you thinking you LOVE it?

Do you want to know how you can do it too?

Well, read on... here's the scoop.

 

1.) Start off by scouring your roadsides for natural flat rock, pay close attention to areas along rivers where they are working.  This rock is FREE for the taking - OR - you could pay for rock at your local stone yard or quarry.  But seeing as we are the Duke and Duchess of Frugal... we collected ours.

2.) Remove any existing fire pits or furniture from the area you are working in.

3.) Cut sod out of area you are working in.  The amazing thing about sod is... in just a year or so it will turn into dirt again.  I mention this because if YOU want to avoid having a sod pile in your driveway you could stack it in a garden area and forget about it.  After many years of sod piles in our drive, this is the route we have taken.  We are using one of our vegetable gardens to compost our sod.

Obviously, we won't be using our raised garden this year.  You can see the area in the foreground  that was tilled.  This made it much easier to shovel the dirt into the wheelbarrow.

4.) After your sod is removed, install some depth/height gauges to insure that your floor is level.  Lex tapped some stakes into the ground and ran some string from one side to the other.  We used this string as a visual guide in determining which rock to place.  We built up areas where it was lower with smaller rock and more dirt.  You could buy sand or construction gravel for this purpose too, but as I said earlier we are "fugal".

We opted to have a "sunken" fire pit look.  We did not place stone under the fire pit.  We placed stone around it.  This gave it a custom "built in" look.

 In case you can't see the smile in the picture above...

• I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR

• I AM EXCITED TO BE DONE LAYING STONE

•  And last but not least...I am thinking about the COLD BEER waiting for me at the end of the day.

5.) After our fire pit and stones were in place we tilled our garden until we had enough dirt to fill about 15 (no joke) wheelbarrows. We then used the dirt to fill in the areas between the stones.  The dirt became our grout.  We used a push broom to level it out and push it into all of the cracks and crevices. 

6.) After it was smoothed out and all areas were filled, we watered down the entire site.  The water will help the loose dirt to firm up and become more grout like.  After it dries tomorrow, we will re-sweep the stones add more dirt.  You should expect the dirt (and stones) to settle and become lower than they initially are. But that's OK.  With a little patience and initial prep work, you'll end up with a flat surface.

CHEERS !

A frosty mug of Lex's homebrew.  mmm, mmm good.

Here's to another thing off our list!