Granite Stone Paving

Last summer, I decided to tackle one of the those mega projects that I kept on pushing forward: the granite stone paving in front of Villa Linnea.

I knew it’s a big project to pave the 7.5×6 meter area in front of the main door. I did lay the curb-stones already several years ago but I didn’t find the motivation to get started with the knee-busting exercise to lay hundreds of natural stones. But with the workshop ready, I ran out of excuses and embraced the battle.

I ordered a bit more than 5 tons of natural stones which should be enough for 46 m2. The stones are 10×10 cm wide and 5 cm thick which should be more than enough for foot traffic. The grey stones come from Finland and have a rough, uneven surface. In addition, I ordered 5 tons of fine grey stone ash to bed the stones and fill the seems. I bought the stones from kivitori.fi which forgot to deliver some 100 stones and ended up making another free delivery. The quality of the stones varies. I would say that approximately every tenth stone is pretty useless because it either has drill holes or saw marks, but I counted that in my calculations.

I kicked off the project by spreading few centimetres of stone ash to create slopes away from the house and from the middle towards the sides to guide the rainwater. I then compressed the area with a 80 kg shaker, which I borrowed from a local builder for 25 Euro a day.

I started with laying three rows of stones along the curbstones.

The next step was to shape the circle.

Once the the circle was ready I started to fill in the remaining areas…

Until now I could lay mostly whole stones. But in the areas where the circle met the outer rows, I had to cut quite some stones to a fitting size with the angle grinder.

I typically worked a few hours per day to spare my knees and my wrist from any major damage. Hence, it took me all summer (and a few days past the summer) to complete this project. A total of 6 rows I did twice – pulling out the stones again – in order get a more even slope. Each of the 3.500 natural stones got in average 5 hits with the hammer which accounts for some 17.000 hammer movements. Ridiculous when one thinks about it…

But the results pays off.

We’ll see how it looks after the winter frost…