Sand in your crack

Title too much?  Sorry.  We are having a soiree in August at Casa Hilton. That is my new last name, isn't it fabulous?  This party will be primarily on our patio, so we did a little 'spruce up' last weekend.

The obvious problems were disgusting dirt...

...and completely missing polymeric sand in between some pavers.

So I divised a concoction for cleaning the pavers before we redid the sand.

I remembered that I had bought this masonry cleaner a few years ago to clean our basement concrete before painting, and I thought it would work well for any tough stains on our concrete pavers. I threw a big scoop of Oxy Clean in there as well, because Oxy Clean is the BOMB!  This mixture was super bubbly. 

We did buy a heavy duty scrubber on a long handle for this job.

Then we used the hose to rinse off and push the dirty suds to the grass. This was kind of a long process.

We waited a few hours for the sun to dry everything up, then put our polymeric sand (we had an entire bag left from the original construction) into quart baggies with the ends snipped off for application.

I realize most people just sweep it into the cracks, but that is what we did originally and I was not impressed with the longevity of the sand, so we did it this way to make sure that each and every crack was filled. (HA!) The difference was extremely gratifying.

Polymeric sand is supposed to stop weeds from forming, but sadly this isn't completely the case. We spent a lot of time pulling little baby weeds out of the cracks.  Wop wop.  We ended up with a lot of excess sand when we swept the remainder off, but that's ok.

The final step was to lightly wet the entire patio and then hope that it doesn't rain for 2 days afterwards.  We did get a light sprinkle of rain, but mostly the weather cooperated! 

It all looked so nice when wet, I was hoping it would dry perfect as well.

And, it totally did...as perfect as it will get, anyway!

I'm SO happy we took the time to redo the sand and clean the pavers. 

Wanna come hang out?  Shoot me an email!

(Taken with my new toy - a sweet fisheye lens!  Don't mind the stupid recycling bin...what an eyesore...)