How to Bring Your Patio to Life with Beautiful Stone
Adding stone to your patio can be both exciting and daunting. With a variety of options, The Rock Yard can help you in this process. To eat the proverbial elephant “a bite at a time”, try breaking up your decision-making process into these three manageable macro-steps, each with a few mini-questions to help you organize your plans.
Answer these questions to get started:
1) What is the Purpose of the Project?
- Do you want just a patio or are you looking at adding stone to an outdoor kitchen or fireplace? Although you may not want to do everything at once, you may want to consider these options as phases in your project.
- What size area are you going to change and what is the overall look you are going for? For example, you could go with a more uniform look, or a natural look with stones of different sizes and shapes. Your layout could have neatly set rows with edges that touch, or a more mosaic type appearance.
2) What Materials Do You Need?
- What type of stone do you want? Options include, but are not limited to flagstone, fieldstone,etc. Want the natural stone look? You might explore flagstone.
- What colors of stone do you want? Once you’ve selected a type or two of stone you can zero in on colors to match your home and current landscaping scheme.
- What size of stone pieces do you like best? Size and color of different stones may vary in cost which brings us to point number 3…
3) What’s Your Budget?
- What are the short-term and long-term expected costs? If you go cheap on price, sometimes you get cheap appearance and less durability, which can cost more over time. Also, relating to your big picture plan in #1, where might investing on the front end help save on future add-on projects?
- When you factor in time and expertise, it may be cheaper to make this a do-it-yourself project based on materials alone, but what’s the cost of doing it wrong and having to do it over again or pay someone to fix something down the road?
Get Started on Your Patio Stone Project
Our product calculators can help you to determine the amount of stone or the amount of other materials you may need. For more information or to speak with a patio stone representative from The Rock Yard, contact us today!