We wanted to spruce up our front sidewalk. Currently it is functional… but kind of ugly and a lot tilted to one side.
It slopes drastically to the left. I don’t think that the walkway had settled, I suspect it might have been poured this way. The down spout water flows right into the path and then the path shuttles the water down under the stairs. Fortunately, we live in a location where we don’t have too much freezing weather. Nothing says “welcome to our home” like a dangerous icy front path.
We decided to go the lazy/easy fix route for this project (unusual for us) and not jack-hammer up the sidewalk or pour more concrete. We purchased some pea grave to hopefully level out the area.
We had a bunch of “larger” rocks that we had sifted out of our sand (for the concrete countertops). This is a two birds with one stone situation… we needed to dispose of the rock and it could be used as a compacted base for the peastone.
The area over by the stairs was lower than the rest of the sidewalk and benefited from bringing up the grade a bit.
Compacting the base layer in this section:
By the photo, it looks like were at at least nine bags of pea stone at this point:
Spencer did most of the compacting… and by most I mean all:
We ran out of the sifted sand-rock and continued without it:
A lesson from this experience: I would suggest buying extra stone at the beginning (or mix bags together) to make sure your color is consistent throughout the entire project. We ran out of stone and went to a different store to get more in order to finish. The second group of bags were the same color, but had slightly more white stone per bag, making the second section look paler overall.
After the project:
This is an earlier project that we did on the outside of the house. After we had been living with the peastone for a while, the “higher” sections of the concrete sidewalk have started to show through the stone. The pea stone has successfully filled out the low areas, but it has turned out not to be a perfect blanket of stone.
This is a very minor example, but you get the idea:
Also, the pea stone rolls a bit underfoot. Initially, I had seen pea stone used for walkway applications and thought it was an appropriate product… but apparently after some forum research, many people dislike this stone. (I will note that it is the only decorative stone of this sort that you can find at Home Depot or Lowe’s).
Thinking of a replacement, a flat slate chip would be a better alternative. We would also probably bring up the level of the brick border on one side – in order to accommodate the high points of the concrete. Live and learn for this one!