Resealing Bricks

It was a rough winter last year.  What that means is that I have to reseal the patio blocks again.  There were a few that due to shoveling snow and ice forming in the low spots ended up scraping off the layers of sealant that I put on last year.  I also don’t want to let them go to the point where, like last year, I have to pull all 150 blocks out, scrub them to remove dirt and moss, and them lay them back down before resealing.  I did make an effort to pull a few blocks up that had settled and formed some low spots.  I also wanted to make sure all the ones up against the garage foundation were graded so that water didn’t pool.  Finally, I wanted to make sure that the gaps on the retaining bricks were consistent.

That only took a couple of days this year. As opposed to a couple of weeks last year.  So once that was done, we got out the sealer and went to town.  Oh, and I should also point out that I also needed to replace A LOT of the locking sand between the blocks.  For whatever reason, we lost a lot of that over the winter.  Although some of it was also gone last fall.  The ants sure do a number on that stuff, even after having it sealed with the patio blocks.

Of course, I notice after everything is done that there are a few spots (about 4 or 5) where it looks like water is going to pool. If it weren’t for the fact that it would be more of a pain in the butt to rip everything out and just have grass there, I would just rip everything out and try planting grass.  Maybe I can rig up some sort of drainage system to get rid of any standing water.  Come wintertime, ice and snow are going to settle there and just make everything as bad as it was this year and I’ll be ripping them up to try and re-level them again anyway.