This summer I put in a paver patio. We like our yard, but since our house was built five years ago, we haven’t really had a good place to just sit outside and enjoy it. A patio’s been on the to-do list, but I just never got around to it; so to create some motivation, we established a goal this year to get a patio installed by C’s birthday at the end of August.
We battled some wet weather early on (like the entire month of June), but get it done we did, and with a full week to spare.
I won’t say that installing a paver patio is easy, but it’s not overly difficult. If you like a little DIY, it’s certainly doable, and the concepts are the same regardless of the scale of your project. It just may take a while, and it involves a lot of physical labor: between the dirt, crushed limestone, sand, pavers, and wall blocks, I easily moved dozens of tons of material to get this done. Probably not something to do if you have a bad back.