Installing Brick Pavers Over Existing Cement Sidewalk

Are you thinking about adding curb appeal to your home? As in some pretty brick work? If you ever thought about installing brick pavers over existing cement sidewalk, this post is for you. If you’re like me, you may have wondered can it even be done?

Will I still need to do some demo work?

Or how can I convince my husband it will be worth it. LOL 😉

We should probably start with some before pictures. So you can get an idea of what we were working with.

Installing Brick Pavers Over Existing Cement Sidewalk

The above photo was actually taken the day we first saw our home for sale. Little did we know that 2 days later we would be placing an offer on it. As you can see in the following pictures, we have really made a lot of changes to it. Of course, the first was the paint color. Which you can read all about my trials of picking out the right paint color here.

We also added a new roof, and are in the process of adding a new porch and installing brick pavers over existing cement sidewalk in the above photo. But let’s take a moment to notice our nasty cement sidewalk.

YUCK, right?

The cement was cracking, and the texture was so mismatched. It was so odd how the cement was really rocky in some areas, and smooth as can be in other areas. Of course it doesn’t help that my “before” photo and “during” photos were both taken during the winter months.
Everything always looks gross in the winter.

It’s also important for me to note, that we had to do all these home improvements over time. Like years.

Because,…#1…money doesn’t grow on trees, ya know.

We bought our house in 2014, and I think it was in 2015, when I finally realized I needed to treat our home like a real living being. Realizing that it takes time, money, and things have to evolve and change in order to make big decisions. Homes will always need maintenance, but when it comes to major cosmetic surgery 😉 – you know like a roof, sidewalks, exterior upgrades – you’ve got to treat it like a living being.

But finally – we were ready to upgrade our cement sidewalk to brick pavers. I was SO ANXIOUS to get this started, and have a pretty herringbone brick sidewalk. Thankfully, we didn’t have to do any demo work. Do you hear me, men??? If there’s any men reading this – zero demo work to put these pavers over our existing sidewalk. These brick pavers that we found are only 1 3/8 thick. So there’s basically half the thickness of a regular size brick.

We completely eliminated the cost of any demo work — or by us doing the hard manual work ourselves by finding these THIN brick pavers. My husband was at first worried that we would be making our sidewalk too high my placing these on top of our existing sidewalk. But really and truly you can’t even tell the difference because they’re just over an inch thick. The other advantage for us is that we already had monkey grass along the borders of our sidewalk. Which also helped in creating a barrier and a “visual” step up & over to get to the sidewalk.

Of course, when they started installing brick pavers over existing cement sidewalk we mowed our monkey grass all the way down so our masonries could work.

I tend to be a wordy person, and I’m really trying to control the amount of words I’m using in this post because let’s face it – you’re here to see how it looks in the end – or – if installing brick pavers over existing cement sidewalk can be done.

The answer is YES, you can.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

Let me remind you – that we never had a roof over our porch. Our porch was originally a half circle shape and that was it! But when we got the metal roof installed, I designed this small roof over our porch. We knew that in a few months we would be taking on the project for the brick sidewalks. So it’s stayed propped up like this for a few months. But the end was totally worth it!!!

So are you ready to see the afters???

Here’s the before – 1 more time…

And the beautiful after…

If you’ve gotten this far in the post – bless you. That was long. But of course, I’m sure you understand after seeing the pictures. We’ve done a lot to our home, and it’s such a struggle for me to condense my words and pictures down.