Now came what we thought was the easy part: you can’t put the hot tub down on the grass, so you need some hard surface to be under the tub. We thought it would be a snap. Well, it isn’t. Our first thought was to have a simple concrete pad poured under the tub. But then, we thought it would be better to build a small patio, so that we could walk from the deck to the patio and then into the tub. In the summer, it would help keep grass and dirt out of the hot tub. In the winter, it would be easier to clean off a patio than try to walk through the snow to get to the tub.
So now we went from a concrete pad to a concrete patio. But plain concrete is so, well, plain. How can we make it a little more interesting? Our next thought was that we could do “stamped concrete”: where a pattern is stamped into a concrete pad and it looks like flagstone, or something else. So we got some estimates for stamped concrete.
But then, the more we thought about it, the more we decided that we wanted something else. We were worried about keeping the area under the tub dead level, yet having the proper drainaige away from the house and the to ensure that the patio drained properly. The best way to do that was to make the patio out of concrete pavers. We took a lot of bids, talked to a lot of contractors, and finally picked one out.
The first step in making anything, of course, is to build a foundation. This picture shows the “foundation” after the work crew dug up the area for the patio, and then put down the crushed stone, power tamped it, and then put this stone down. At this point the dog was very unhappy, since he needs to traverse this field of stone in order to move from the deck to the lawn.
As I wrote this post, I came to realize that the phrase “requirements creep” can be applied to more than just government contracts…
October 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm kdor870gfaabf83x mpdeulk jumzu http://rcloiatfxwj.com cnfddvt zyeasn http://grzdpichdhss.com eivdic whygohj http://gfecdu.com ckxmk lrrfas http://vswlphr.com