How To Build A Flagstone Walkway - Using Concrete

Hi, I'm Shane with PrecisionTurf and today, as you see behind me, we're working on a flagstone walkway. Now, we've done one before on our channel that we just did rocks between the flagstone, but today what we've done is we're building the flagstone patio with a concrete base. Okay, so we already had our concrete guys come out and lay the base. It's a four-inch base. You want to have your concrete guys lay that concrete an inch and a half below your grade. So, if you're tying into an existing porch or if you're tying to an existing walkway, you want to go an inch and a half below that. Okay, the reason is because we're using one-inch flagstone on top of that with a half-inch bed of mortar. It's going to give you some wiggle room, room to lay it and get it level. Step one, clean your concrete. Get ready for your flagstone, your mortar. Step two, pull your forms up. If you can't pull your forms up to your desired height, you're going to have to build more forms. Hopefully, you can just pry your forms up. Typically, we'll pull the concrete forms up to match the height of what we need to lay our flagstone at, but as we started pulling the concrete forms up, they were breaking. So, we just pulled all those out and then that's when we should have cleaned the concrete off. We got a big rain last night. Concrete was super dirty. You want that concrete clean before you put your bed of Portland or mortar or concrete, whatever you call it, on there. So, we forgot that and put our forms back up and then we cleaned it. You can do that, but we just wasted some time. That's something for you guys. You don't want to do that. Clean that concrete off. Get it ready for your bed of mortar for your flagstone. A little pro tip here, instead of using a tape measure to measure the height of your forms outside your concrete, just grab a piece of wood. Cut it to your desired height and you can slide it down. You'll see in the video here, there's a little white piece of wood that I'm using. It'll save you a lot of time. Step three, lay your flagstone out. Don't mix any mortar yet. Lay your flagstone out. Know where your cuts are going to be. Go ahead and make your cuts and put your puzzle together. What you see our main man Raul doing here is just lifting and then placing back down. He'll lift again to check it and then he's just got a rock and he's going to mark where the cut needs to happen. The most time-consuming part of this whole process is finding rocks that will fit in the spots that you like them to fit or that will fit as closely as you like them to fit so that you don't waste too much and then the actual cutting of those rocks. It's a giant puzzle. Use your creativity. Find the ones that you like to go where you want them to go and then cut them to fit. Step four, mix your mortar. Three parts to one. Three parts sand. If you're going with the Portland 1-2, which is what we make our base out of, three parts sand, one part Portland. So we do three five-gallon buckets of sand, one five-gallon bucket of Portland, and we go ahead and add a quarter bucket of hydrated lime in there. It's supposed to help everything stay together. Mix this until you don't see any discolorment. You see how in this video here you can see the yellow sand. So we're going to continue mixing until everything looks the same color. When it comes to adding in your water, here's a video with great technique on how to do that. I'll throw a link in the description so you can watch his method and also his consistency. It's going to be pretty similar to what you're looking for. But when you go to put your water in, you want to start with about a quarter part and add it in and then work your way up from there up to about a half a part, maybe a little bit more. Step five, you lay your bed mortar and start working your rocks onto that, leveling with the four-foot level as you go. Use your forms to run them across and make sure everything's level. Also, you don't want to build it perfectly flat. I know that's the way we would typically, you know, in our minds we would think build stuff flat. Well, you don't want to build it perfectly flat because you want water to run off of it. So today we're sloping away from the house an eighth of an inch. It's a 36-inch walkway. We're just sloping an eighth of an inch. The natural curves and stuff in the rock will help to push that water off anyway. So you can go anywhere from an eighth to a quarter inch slope on a walkway, more if you want. You know, you get too much, you're going to feel weird walking on it. But if you're just doing an eighth to a quarter of an inch, then you're fine. The way we do that is when we're building our forms, to make it easy so that we're not measuring for every time we screw a form to a form state, we'll cut a piece of wood. On one side, this job is an inch and a half. On the other side, it's an eighth of inch lower than that. Okay guys, behind me is the finished product on one side, minus the borders. So let's take a look at this and explain what we did. So here's the walkway. It's almost finished. We have borders to do, and that's what these bricks are for. But if you can see here, here's your base layer of concrete that we had laid initially. This is our bed mortar or bed concrete. You can call it whatever you want to. This is a type 1-2 Portland mix. And then here is your finished joints. You see how that, I don't know if you can tell, but that looks a little bit more sandy. So that is a type N mix, and that's for your joints. What we're going to do is come back in and dig this base down a little bit, this side here. Stick a brick in there. Butter the brick with type N. This old puppy won't see what we're doing. Butter the brick with type N and lay them in there to where it's flat with this blackstone on both sides. Over here, just give you another look. I have to clean this off, but the joints aren't done yet on this one. So we'll come back in and fill these joints with N. The reason you do that is because the type 1-2 is more of a hardened concrete, and it tends to crack if it's on the surface. You need something a little bit more pliable, which is why you do type N. So we got to come here. The bed mortar has already been laid, or the bed concrete. And then down here is where we got to. You can tell the drop difference. So we have to lay the bed concrete in here, let it set up, and then put the joints in. And then also do the brick sides for the border. So this is where we're at in the process. If you're doing this for a job, cutting these flagstone takes a while. I'll give you some advice. If you have a four and a half inch grinder, that's fine because these are one inch flagstone pieces. They're easier to cut. But get a good diamond blade saw. They make one. It's called a fast cutting. It's about $30. One or two of those will get you through this whole job. Don't try to do it with anything less than a good quality saw. If you have a bigger saw, great. But for these one inch, you don't have to have it. The four and a half inch grinder is fine. And you just cut, you know, cut about halfway down, a little bit more, and then tap it with a hammer, and it'll break. Okay, let's talk about the joint mortar for a second. You're going to mix that type N, the same ratio as you mix the type 1-2. Three buckets of sand, one bucket of Portland type N, and a quarter bucket of hydrated lime. You want this mix to be a little bit more pliable than your type 1-2 because you're going to put it in a cake bag. So mix it up to the consistency that you can put it in a cake bag and squeeze it into those joints. You're just going to make sure it's totally filled and wipe off the top excess and clean it up. Now I'm going to bring you back to the borders. We did not talk about borders in the beginning of this video. You can build this without borders if you just leave your forms up and fill in your joints to the forms. Let everything dry and pull the forms up. So you can do it with borders or without borders. I'll tell you where we messed up here with our borders. We did not know that we were going to do borders on this initially. So we started the job as if we weren't going to. And then it was changed to where we were going to add brick borders. So moving forward, if you are going to put borders on your flagstone walkway, you can use those borders as your guides for your flagstone. Instead of having to pull up your concrete forms or put new forms on there, go ahead and build out your borders first. Let that dry and then fill in your flagstone between the borders. The last step in the process is to power wash your flagstone. Now you want to be careful here. Don't get too close to the grout that you just laid in between all that flagstone. It will cut it if you get too close to that. The reason we power wash it is number one to get all the concrete dust off the rocks so the true shine comes through. And the other reason that we power wash it is because flagstone is flagstone, right? So it's shaved layers of rock. And so some of those shaved layers have loose pieces of flagstone on them. You don't want those coming off from a customer walking. Go ahead and push those little pieces off with your power wash. Okay everyone, that's it. How to build a flagstone walkway. Please enjoy this video montage to see the final project. Hey, thanks for watching today. If this helped you in any way, please subscribe to our channel. Hit that like button, smash it, and remember two rules. Love God, love others, and let your work reflect that. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next one.