Courtyard Garden: Picking The Pavers

We are up to the next part of our courtyard garden design plan which is to lay the pavers, grass and garden beds.

We'll finally be rid of the sand pit out the front of the house where it's been hard to avoid walking the sand in and out of the house for the last few years while it's been like this!

But I can always see the light at the end of the renovating tunnel and I'm so excited that we are ready to pave this area and there'll be no more sand!

We did a final measure of our garden design and used flagging tape to mark out where the garden beds, paved areas and grass areas will be. 

Around the front of the house here we'll have a succulent pebble garden bed with plants in pots and a rain chain feature.

In the far corner and extending over a metre on either side will be a garden bed we'll have built from limestone blocks and we'll fill with lots of yummy vegetables and fresh herbs.

I can't wait to grow my own herbs again I use them all the time in cooking and hate having to buy them from the supermarket!

Once we had all the measurements we worked out how many pavers we will need and how many blocks we'll need to build the garden beds.

The grass we'll get at the end once all the work is done so that we can buy it and lay it straight away.

We are going to pave 65m2 of the courtyard with the remainder being two grass patches in the centre and the two garden beds.

For the pavers we want a limestone/cream coloured paver so that it matches the render and painted exterior of the house and the limestone courtyard fence.

We had a choice of these three samples from two local suppliers .....

The paver on the left is made from limestone where as the other two on the right are made from concrete.

Concrete does heat up underfoot and as this area gets full sun we needed a paver that will stay cool underfoot.

The limestone paver stays cool underfoot and is also a bit cheaper.

These two were my favourites - a beach design and reef design.

The beach design was a bit more of a cream colour whereas the reef design was a bit brighter.

While I liked the brightness of the reef design, in the end we went for the 400mm x 400mm square limestone paver in the beach design (on the left hand side).

This is because it's made from limestone so it will be cool underfoot, was a few dollars cheaper per m2 than the other pavers and matches our house exterior colour perfectly.

We have ordered the pavers from Dan-Stone a local company who make their own limestone pavers and our pavers are being hand made as I type this blog post!

As soon as the pavers are delivered we need to order a load of sand for fill so the courtyard can be leveled and a load of cracker dust so it can be compacted. That's all the supplies we need then the paving guys can get started on laying the pavers.

While we do a lot of DIY projects ourselves, we know when to leave some jobs to the professionals, like this one and I know they will do an amazing job.

What type of outdoor paving do you have? 

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[All images my own]