This is my favorite time of year with the trees leafing out and all the plants and blooms adding such beautiful color to our world, especially in these “not so normal” times.
These are some of our early touches of color in our yard. We’ve had a good amount of sunny, warm days in April so that has added a lot of brightness to our stay-at-home days.
We also took the time to improve our brick patio. Every year it would get so many weeds/grass coming up between the bricks that I decided to find a product to put between the bricks to make the patio one solid slab. I found a polymeric jointing sand that we used. First Steve power washed all the areas between the bricks and then we waited until we had several dry days in a row and swept the jointing sand over the bricks and into the areas between the bricks, kind of like grouting tile. Then we watered the patio down and this causes a reaction in the sand that creates an epoxy that makes the sand hard and adheres to the bricks. The big issue we ran into was the layer of sand that was left on top of the bricks before we watered. It became hard and we ended up trying several things, but finally decided on a grinding wheel attached to a drill to take off the dried sand and we had to do each and every brick. So this took us a week or more, but we are SO happy with the final result. Oh and we didn’t get enough sand to cover the whole patio originally so had to wait to get it ordered online and picked up curbside, so the whole process took about two weeks, but hey we had the time 🙂 These are some before and after photos of our project.
Reflections by Sal 