A friend was telling me about a neat thing he had bought at Lowe's home improvement store. It's a form for pouring paving stones. He used it to put in a path from his house to his shop. I was curious about it, so he let me borrow it.

On my homestead, the parking area is in front of the garage, which is detached from my house. So there's a walk of perhaps 35 yards from my concrete side porch to the driveway. The people who built this house had put in a sidewalk of decomposed/crushed granite. I hate that sidewalk. It's noisy to walk on (crunch crunch crunch is all you hear). The small pieces of pink granite, which is native to this area of Texas and quite common, get into the treads of your boots and you end up with them on the floor of the house. The sidewalk is messy and it's a pain in the rear to keep the grass from growing in the middle of it. When it rains, there are puddles in the sidewalk. When my boots are muddy from being out in the pasture or in the horse stalls, the granite sticks to my boots. It's been a constant battle.

So the idea of poured-in-place paving stones really appealed to me. I had a couple of sacks of Quickcrete left over from my barn project, so I decided to see how the form worked. And I liked it so much, I decided to do the entire sidewalk with it. It will take me a long time to finish it, but as long as I do a little each weekend it isn't so bad.

Here is a picture of one portion of the sidewalk, between the garage and my house. There is more of this sidewalk in front of the house, but this is where the most traffic occurs. You can see the old crushed granite sidewalk.



By my calculations, I will have to pour on this form about 86 times to complete the project. So far I have poured on it only 14 times, which puts me about 1/6th of the way toward completion. But you can see what it will look like when it's done.



As you can see, most of the paving stones are plain concrete. But every once in a while, I will add some concrete dye to the mix so there is some color in there. I think it gives it a more interesting look, and breaks up the pattern a little bit. If you really look hard, you can see the repeating pattern. The form gets turned for each pour, so it's not the same pattern on each pour. But after every four pours, the pattern repeats.

I thought you guys might like to see this, in case you have a similar project that needs doing. This ends up being a lot cheaper than buying pre-made paving stones, and you don't have to try to fit them together on your own. You just place the form, mix your concrete, trowel it in, clean your tools, pick up the form, reset it, and repeat. The longest part of the process is mixing the concrete and placing it into each cell of the form by hand, making sure there are no voids at the sides, and smoothing the tops off.

Since I don't have any fancy equipment, I just mix the Quickcrete in a bucket, about 20-30 pounds worth at a time. By the time I've got them all filled, wash off my trowel, clean out the bucket, and smoke a cigarette, the concrete is stiff enough that the form can be removed. I typically oil the form after every two pours so it can be stripped easier and it won't mess up the finish on the sides. In fact, you can see at the bottom of the picture where the first pavers I did have the sides messed up. That was because I didn't oil the form. The quality improved greatly as I progressed.

The cost is not bad. A 60-pound sack of Quickcrete costs less than $4, and it only takes about 50-55 pounds to fill the form. I haven't measured the form, but I'm thinking it's about 18" x 18". All in all, it's costing about $1.50 per square foot to do this sidewalk, and I'm doing it a little at a time.

The benefit, of course, is that I will have no more granite gravel coming into the house. Even when it rains, the water will puddle between the pavers so I won't be splashing my way to the house. And it's a lot more attractive, adding visual appeal to the property. I can even let the grass grow between the pavers for a neat look. I'm doing sets of two side-by-side to fill the original walk, but you could make a pathway that's just one square wide.

Here is a picture of the form. It's made by Quickcrete. I don't know what the form costs, since I did not buy it, but it can't be that expensive.

First of all... I LOVE the Partridge Family color effect of the faux-stones. Thats awesome. "C'mon get Happy!" I have seen the fake brick pour in place molds. But never that mold you were using.

How long did it take you to trowl the concrete into the mold? I understand you were doing small batch quantities by hand. But your guestimates would be helpful.

I have a mixer which can handle about 240lbs of dry mix at a time. Although 180lbs mixes a better and more uniform blend. So, if I was to get 6-8 of the molds and perhaps a 3 or 4 man crew, I was wondering how much I could get done in a day.

Also, do you think it would be possible to modify the mold to be able to handle curves and arc's?

If someone were keeping me supplied with concrete that's ready to go, I would imagine that I could fill the mold every 12-15 minutes or so. It's just a matter of slopping the mud into the cells and working it around in there so that there are no voids. Normally in my business when we're placing concrete into forms, we use vibrators to liquefy the mix, which fills the air voids, preventing the "honeycomb" effect when you strip the forms. But doing this small work by hand, I'm just using my trowel as a vibrator. Once I've filled a cell, I stick the trowel down in there and give it a few good quick shakes until the mix liquefies, and then it's just a matter of topping it off and troweling it smooth. What would make it go much quicker is if I had a small vibrator to do that. Don't laugh, but a 6" phallic-shaped 'woman pleaser' vibrator would be perfect for this. If I had one of those, the form could be filled and troweled off in as little as 5 minutes.

It's been taking me probably 45 minutes for each complete pour on this form. That includes oiling the form, mixing the concrete by hand, placing it by hand as I just described, cleaning my tools and bucket, cleaning the form and re-oiling it, etc. It also includes mixing in the dye for a few of the pavers.

If I had to guess, I would say that a 2-man team (one to do the mixing, cleaning, etc., to feed the other guy who does nothing but place and finish) could easily turn 5 pours per hour. For 8 hours of work, that would be 40 pours in a day. Roughly 60 linear feet, if you were only doing a single-wide walking path. If they got pretty good at it, or didn't get as anal about quality control as I am being here, they may be able to do much more than that. Maybe 75 linear feet in 8 hours?

I think a 3-man team would be even better. The mixer/cleaner could keep at least 2 placer/finishers busy. Maybe more. If he were doing large batches like you're talking about, it would be a matter of just feeding the placer/finishers. If, say, one man on the mixer could handle five 180-pound batches per hour plus stay on top of cleaning the finishers' forms, he could feed three placer/finishers. Yielding at least 15 pours per hour. Total of 120 pours in an 8-hour day. That's about 180 linear feet per day. But keep in mind that this would take a LOT of Quickcrete. That's 7,200 pounds of the stuff. Even with a mixer, the team is going to be very tired at the end of the day. And there ain't no getting around the fact that you have to do this work on the ground, so your back starts to hurt after a while.

I would say that each placer/finisher would need 3 forms. He fills one and immediately starts on the second. By the time he starts the third, the mixer/cleaner can strip the first one and start cleaning it. So by the time the placer/finisher is finished with the third one, the first one is ready to be reset. Just keep leap-frogging them like that and it would go quickly.


I think it would do curves OK as-is. Not real tight ones, but gradual curves. Just vary the gap between each pour and let it curve around. The cool thing is that after the form is stripped and the pavers have had time to cure a bit, they can be moved around just like a loose paving stone. So if your curved path started to look segmented due to the wedge-shaped gaps between pours, you could even it out a little bit by adjusting individual pavers to blend it in.

What do you think about perhaps thinning the quikcrete mix with some pea gravel?

For example, I have done thousands of linear feet of poor-man's concrete raised bed edging. Basically I stake in 50' lengths of flexible plastic landscape edging 6" apart. Then I pour in concrete. In the past, I have mixed up two 60lb bags of concrete and added 1 or 1.5 (5) gallon buckets of pea gravel to the mix. For the edging it did not really matter. The texture and cracks over time added character.

Do you think this mold system could handle material shortcuts like that?

Sure, it could.

In fact, the first few pours I made on the form were using the old stuff I had from my barn project, which were 80-pound sacks of Quickcrete. They had more of the coarse aggregate in them than the new stuff I'm buying in 60-pound sacks. So they did have quite a bit of pea gravel sized aggregate, and it worked just fine. As long as you can vibrate or otherwise liquefy the mix enough so you don't get major voids (if you care), then it would be fine. If you're not worried about appearance, it's even better.

Heidi and I bought one of those forms back in '98 and played around with it some. With it we made a floor to set a metal storage shed on, behind the travel trailer we were living in.

At the time I was thinking about making the floor of our cottage out of that stuff.

Talk about being cheap, I used the soil from the site mixed with just enough portland cement to bind it.
I made a 2x4 frame coverd with hardware cloth, set it against a tree and threw each shovel full of dirt against that as I dug the site level. The screen kept out the sticks, leaves, bigger rocks and what-not, and we used the finer stuff for the mix.

Heh, that screening frame is now a garden gate...

I did throw in some "tube sand" I had laying around into the mix as well.
After we removed the form we troweled a soupy mix in the grooves between the individual pavers to make the floor flat.

It's held up reasonably well considering it was laid directly upon the earth and was made of a very poor soil cement mix. It's still there although the shed has since been moved. I can't take a picture of it though because it's under four feet of snow...

Well, it was a bit to much like work so we decided to make a brick on sand floor for the cottage.

About two years ago we built a pathway here at work using the same form. This one came out very sturdy. It was built over a slab walkway so it has an excellent base.

It's rather boring though, because it's all the same color.


+1 Tobus, that little detail really makes a world of difference!

Hmmm, Tobus, I'm a bit worried about this.

We had trouble with the pavers on the edge of the floor we made breaking off with heavy foot traffic.

Usually in the dark when you were carrying something heavy and not paying attention to where your feet were.
We'd trod heavily on the paver right on the edge, and it would shift out of place even though we tried to "glue" everything in and even up the floor by filling in all the grooves.

There is material beneath the grooves, but it isn't much and can crack if the substrate gives at all.

I think you might need some kind of boarder for your walk to prevent this maybe?

With the walkway we have here at work, dirt was added to bring the finished grade up to even with the top of the pavers. This prevents their migration.

If you look at the pictures above, there was already an existing border on either side of the walkway. It's metal. And it's firmly in place. It was what the original owner put in place to fill inbetween with the crushed granite. It just so happens that I can fit two pours between these borders and it works out perfectly. If the pavers near the edge move at all, it won't be much. They'll be retained by the metal border.

I am thinking about filling inbetween the pavers with sand, but I'm not sure I want to do that yet. I may just let the grass grow between them, which will actually lock them in place very well.

Looks good Tobus. That's a really neat project.

I would suggest adding an 'old world' touch to it. Take some cuttings of some of the herbs you have growing in the gardens in front of the house and plant them on the sides. Drop a bit of soil in the cracks... just enough for some of the herbs to vine and take root in. You can creep the soil as they grow into the cracks and control the growth a bit. As the herbs grow in and bush out, foot traffic across the pathway yields the aroma from the herb adding to the olfactory appeal. This is a very common thing to see in Europe in some of the gardens that have been around for centuries.

That's an idea I've never heard before, Nidrah. I'm assuming something like basil is what you had in mind?

Thyme and even things like clover species are very common in Europe. Basil would be a bit too bushy. You might find some that could vine okay, but you'd want small leaf basil like Greek basil. You really want something that grows outward and flat like clover rather than something that bushes like basil or rosemary.

Here are some other suggestions from a few websites I've looked at:

Roman chamomile, Dutch white clove, purslane, creeping thyme, Corsican mint, and santolina.

This page was a fun read.

Irish moss is AWESOME with those stones.

Also think about using hypertufa as a medium.

And, is there an outlet that sells prefab forms such as those, but different patterns? I am not too jazzed about that one.

AA

AA, here's some I found with a quick search:

http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?...,33222&ap=1

http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?...,33222&ap=1

By the way, Theduardo, I measured the form and it's 24"x24" (roughly). So everything I mentioned above about productivity and such, needs to be multiplied by 1.33 to be correct.

Thanks, Tobus. Those look a mite better.

AA