We decided we are going to take it out and redo the part of the patio (the hot tub was sunken in the patio), and make it to a platform for patio furniture or an outdoor fire place or pit.
Couple of weeks I had couple of friends over. We used a reciprocating saw to cut the hot tub in pieces and took the whole thing to the dump.
So it went from this
to this, roughly an 8ft by 8ft hole filled with crushed concrete.
Couple of days ago I created couple options for the design pattern to use for our platform.
Yesterday, Donna & I rented a truck and made a visit to Home Depot to get some supplies for the patio project. We bought 190 charcoal 5.8″Lx5.8″Wx2.4″H pavers, 70 Red-Charcoal 7.8″Lx3.9″Wx2.4″H pavers, 30 bags of paver sand (1500 lbs, huh?), and rented a vibrating compactor and a diamond blade saw to cut the pavers (it turned out the pavers made almost perfect fit so we ended up not using the saw at all). We hauled all this stuff home and unloaded it to our backyard. I initially had thought we would only need about 16 bags of the sand as I had planned on putting in some paver base in first and use 1″ layer of sand on top of that. But then I figured a foot and half layer of crushed concrete should be good enough for the base, so we ended using double amount of sand from the original plan.
First, we compacted the crushed concrete base with the compactor, then in three sections, we laid down about 2 inches of sand, leveled it, and pounded in the pavers using a soft mallet. When that was done we filled in the gaps with paver sand and then I used the compactor again to pound in the pavers little more.
So here is the end result.
and with couple of chairs and a table with a built-in fire pit on the patio.
Phew! What a way to spend 8 hours in blaring 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit sunshine.
Good work! Looks nice!