At any rate, it took quite some time to dig out the weeds an sift out the roots and begin grading. I knew I had to remove a fair amount of "soil" and, since I wanted to stockpile it for future use, I wanted it to be as clean as possible. I've learned that piling up soil full of nasty stuff just postpones problems for another day.
Getting It Right
Once all the ground was clear, I was ready to get down to business. Staking and measuring is a time consuming affair when dimensions are tight. This is particularly true when you want to pave an area with flagstones, which come in certain sizes and are not at all flexible. Since space was so tight, I decided to use the flagstones as bed edging, too.
The only way to work with flagstone is to draw your plan to scale on paper. It's much easier to work out stone sizes and laying patterns on paper than with a heavy pile of stone, plus, when you buy the stone, you need to know how many pieces of what size you want. Cutting flagstone requires a special saw hooked up to a water source - a bit more than I want to deal with. You can have pieces cut at the stone yard, but this adds to the cost of the material.
Like most construction materials, flagstone sizes are nominal. In other words, an eighteen by eighteen inch (0.45 x 0.45 m) flagstone is more or less about seventeen and a half inches square (0.44 m2). More or less are the operable words because sizes can vary quite a bit - much more than with lumber. If you draw your layout to the nominal size, you will actually be allowing for space between the stones, once laid, for sand infill or mortar.
It gets a tad tricky when sections of flagstone need to abut at specific points because of the variance in stone sizes.
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