Thursday, August 23, 2007

Raised Patio: Footings and More





As promised (well, written, blogged, whatever) I have new pictures with the completed footings. Plus, there are pictures of the blocks we'll use underground and the brick sand.

Getting the sand was eye-opening in several ways. We drove to a local gravel pit and asked for a minimum load (ie put it in the bed of my dad's pickup). They charged us $10 for a cubic yard of fine screened sand. Nice stuff - the kind you'd want to put in a child's sand box. My wife informed me that a bag of "play sand" costs about $2 for about 20kg of sand. Doing some quick online checking, the density of dry sand is about 3000 lbs/cubic yard or 1780 kg/m3 (where 1 m3 == 1.308 cubic yards). That gives about 68 bags of play sand for $10. Only problem is that you have to find a gravel pit, bring a truck and shovel it into all 68 sand boxes by hand. Oh well.

Anyway, today we will start with the laying of the blocks, if the weather cooperates. Looks pretty overcast right now, so we'll see.

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