From Salvage to Chic

What do you do with an old, blue and cracked concrete slab, some random pavers and a free load of scrap from the local stone yard? First you scratch your head and hope that you and your client’s vision of a beautiful hardscape made of repurposed pieces will be realized (in an artful way!). As a designer, I’ve had lots of practice in re-purposing broken concrete, wood and even plant material but this was a little new to me. My concern was in our ability to get the slab up in enough neat rectilinear pieces to work with the other mish-mash material we had. My other concern was the huge disparity in the thickness of the different materials. Some were 6″ and some were barely an inch. As my client worked her magic at the stone yard getting them to donate a whole palette of free scrap I held my breath as we worked to slice and dice the concret slab. To

my amazement we salvaged 90% of it and you can see from the results we found a beautiful new home for it. To this we added a few 18″ square recycled glass and concrete pavers, scrap limestone, slate and bluestone along with concrete pavers we stained with a soy-based product.