Exterior Hardscape, Surfside Beach, SC, 2018

Full disclosure: this was my mother’s house in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. It was a gift, done on a micro-budget. It was also familiar ground. I first painted this house in 1999, in my twenties, though by then I’d been doing construction work since I was 14, growing up with a contractor for a stepfather.

Starting with what was already there

Every brick and paver in this project was found on the property. Old paver stones were buried in the yard around the backyard shed, so the first job was digging them out. Found stone is always a windfall. It’s free, it’s already weathered, and it looks like it belongs because it does.

Just clearing debris and having a clear idea for how the space should be used, where the light falls, and how you move through it will do a lot for a landscape. The design came from the site.

The patio

The recovered stones became an interlocking patio. The biggest part of the job was hauling: paver gravel for the base, drainage sand for the bedding, and topsoil for the beds. A paver patio lasts only as long as what’s underneath it drains and stays level, so the base matters more than the stones.

Planters instead of stump removal

A few old stumps were going to be too hard to dig out, so instead of fighting them, we built over them. Paver stones were pressure-washed clean and stacked into planters around the stumps, bonded with a rugged exterior construction adhesive. A problem became a feature.

The shed

The shed had to have its vines pulled off, then be brushed and sanded down before it was primed and painted. The prep took longer than the painting, as it always does, but the results were dramatic.

Wood chips by Subaru

The planting beds around the house were finished in wood chips, and I hauled every load in my Subaru Outback. With the seats folded down and a liner laid in, it made a passable small truck.

The math

Because the stone was reclaimed and the labor was a gift, the only real costs were the sand, the wood chips, the adhesive, and the paint: a few hundred dollars, well under $1,000. By my estimate, it added around $30,000 to the value of the house. She sold it a couple of years later for much more than she’d paid. Curb appeal is one of the best returns in home improvement, and it doesn’t have to cost much.

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