ᐅ Planning a Ground-Level Patio with Slope – Any Experiences?

Tolentino schrieb:

So far, I have only built a fence

How did the foundations go there?

Tolentino schrieb:

Yes, that hardly saves any effort. Otherwise, your description is pretty much a QED for what I meant. Beam substructure with drilled point foundations requires much less heavy equipment. But I’m venturing out here—I’ve only built fences so far, not a terrace...
I’ll report back in one to two years...

Yes, but what do you need? If necessary, you can just use a wheelbarrow. A general rule is one wheelbarrow per square meter. Otherwise, a dumper costs about €80 per day and can easily handle a full semi-truck load. At the same time, you’ll want someone to spread and compact the material. You can rent a compactor for a week for about €100, and for a terrace, a smaller one is sufficient—you don’t need the 500-kilogram (1100-pound) compactor. So, the equipment requirements are quite moderate.

KingJulien schrieb:

How did it go with the foundations?

Pretty well. I only connected one foundation. So I exposed the old masonry foundation, drilled thick, deep holes, and glued in reinforcing steel bars. Then I poured a new concrete foundation on top. For the others, I either worked around the old foundation or I just made one of the middle foundations longer and wider. It’s now about 40x60x80 cm (16x24x31 inches). We’ve already had several gusts of wind up to 100 km/h (62 mph), and the fence is still standing.

WilderSueden schrieb:

Yes, but what do you need?

WilderSueden schrieb:

Rule of thumb is one wheelbarrow per square meter

But that doesn’t get you down to frost depth—what kind of monster wheelbarrows do you have?

Let’s assume that for the house construction, you’ve already removed the topsoil and only need to dig 50 cm (20 inches) down to frost depth. That’s 0.5 cubic meters (about 0.7 cubic yards) per square meter (by the way, 3–4 wheelbarrow loads of my kind—and mine have two wheels). Let’s take a small terrace of 30 m² (about 323 square feet). That’s 15 m³ (about 20 cubic yards) of excavation. One trip to remove that and another to bring in frost protection material (for me, about 100 EUR gross just for delivery). The frost protection might need more than one trip because of weight limits. A 250 kg (550 lbs) compactor rental costs me about 50 EUR per day, and one day is usually enough. About 2 tons (2.2 US tons) of gravel either costs another 80 EUR delivery or you drive it yourself twice with a trailer. Whether you get wood or stones delivered, you can balance those costs out. But before all that, you definitely have more trips and more equipment that you don’t normally have on hand and need to rent. And let’s be honest, digging out 15 m³ (20 cubic yards) of soil with a shovel doesn’t happen in one day. Depending on the soil type, it’s quite hard work. So you’d add an excavator rental at about 120 EUR per day (gross) or several days of manual labor.

For the substructure over this area, you’d make about 20 pier footings (with counter battens) using an earth auger (which can be tricky depending on soil but easier than removing all the soil and spreading out the excavation). Then you pour in concrete mix (theoretically by hand with bags and water). After that, it’s just screwing together with a cordless drill.

You also set the foundations or later the beams into water level or a slight slope more precisely than you would cleanly grade your entire base layer. For a terrace with a depth of 5 m (16 ft), you can’t really grade it perfectly in one pass, so at the intersection points of your screeding tracks, you always get inaccuracies that you have to compensate for later when laying concrete slabs.

I still maintain that a wooden terrace is easier to build yourself. At least if you haven’t done either before.

Tolentino schrieb:

I still believe that building a wooden deck is easier to do yourself. At least if you haven’t done either before.

Agreeing from experience. Especially if you use mortar bags instead of screws, leveling it becomes an absolute breeze.

It always depends on the level of perfection you expect. I don’t demand absolute perfection from any DIY work, since even professional contractors don’t deliver that at a reasonable price...

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I am by no means a perfectionist. However, consistently, even with a similarly low demand for precision, in my opinion, achieving this is easier for a DIY enthusiast with a wooden deck than with stone.

The only argument in favor of a stone terrace, in my view, is its generally longer durability. That said, the lifespan of wooden decks is longer than commonly believed (at least if proper structural wood protection is applied), while the durability of stone terraces is often overestimated.