Massachusetts · Rhode Island · Connecticut · New Hampshire · Maine
Concrete paver, clay brick and cobblestone, on a base built for the weight that drives over it.
Price your project →A patio base under a driveway is why the ruts appear. Vehicle load is concentrated and repeated in the same two tracks, so the compacted depth goes deeper than a walk or a terrace needs, in lifts, each one compacted before the next goes on. What shows on the surface in year three was decided before a single paver was set.
A paver field pushes outward every time a tyre turns on it. Without a restraint spiked into the base, the border walks, the joints open, and sand migrates out of them. It is the cheapest part of the job and the one whose absence you see first.
Polymeric sand locks the field together and keeps water from washing through the joints into the base. In a freeze-thaw climate a field with open joints takes water in, lifts, and never sits flat again.
A driveway sheds toward somewhere on purpose, and that somewhere is not the garage slab or the neighbour. Pitch is set at the base, not corrected at the surface.
Every wall and patio we have taken apart failed for one of these five reasons. They are most of what separates a job that looks right at twenty years from one that does not make five.
Compacted gravel, deep enough for the ground it sits in. Every course above copies the first one, and so does every mistake in it.
New England ground moves in winter. A footing poured above the frost line lifts with it, and the wall on top of it cracks — not that winter, usually the third one.
Saturated soil expands about nine percent when it freezes, against something that cannot move. Clean stone, fabric, and a pipe run out to daylight.
A tooled joint sheds water off the face of the stone. A joint struck flush holds it there, and held water is what freezes.
The top takes the weather and everything anyone sets on it. Pitched away, set solid, joints tight.
If something we built moves, cracks or fails in the first year because of how it was built, we come back and fix it. No argument, no invoice.
Trace the job on a satellite view of your own property, or send a photograph, and the page prices it. The on-site visit is free and it is what makes it exact.