4/02 Backyard Stepping Stones: We used Quickrete concrete molds to build a pathway from our back patio to the side of our house. We chose the Country Stone mold pattern and colored the cement with Terra Cotta Quickrete Liquid Cement Color. The color ended up being the trickiest part... you see, the bottles of color each color 2 80-lb bags of cement. But our concrete mixing bucket only mixed up one 80-lb bag at a time. So you had to either carefully measure, or (as we did) give your best guess at getting the same amount of color in each batch. We got the hang of it after a while -- but some of our stones are a slightly different colors than others. Overall, the project took about 10 hours, almost half of which was spent digging and leveling the ground for the path. We did 16 stones, spaced so that we can grow some ground cover (perhaps flowers or some kind of fragrant herb) between them. We're very happy with the results... but this will definitely make us reconsider doing our whole patio using this method. Maybe if we rented a nice electric cement mixer... :-)
12 bags of 80 lb concrete @ 2.28/ea = 27.36
6 bottles of cement color @ 4.95/ea = 29.70
1 bag 60 lb sand mix (grout is optional) = 3.18
2 walkmaker stone molds @ 14.67/ea (the 2nd mold is optional but nice) = 29.34
1 concrete mixing bucket = 21.95
1 brick trowel = 5.96
Total cost of project: $117.49
