This clients in Mississauga reached out to us to redo their side patio. They specifically wanted a functional space where they could store anything at the side of their house and to have a safer place for walking on. As you can see this existing patio in the video is completely uneven and presents multiple tripling hazards. It is also unsightly. 

So what we began to do was remove all of the existing patio slabs and dispose of them. We then began our excavation using shovels to dig down 5 inches. In this scenario we’re going to use a synthetic base using paver base panels. These panels help to reduce excavation by at least half. Typically we would excavate a minimum of 10 inches for our base material, bedding material, and pavers. However this client had very poor access for us to get to this area in their backyard. By using a synthetic base this helped us to charge a lot less for labor saving us in that excavation process and Disposal of the excavated material. The paver base panels do cost more in materials But ultimately this saves our clients in the pricing of this project when we consider the labor savings. The paver base panels insulate the ground as well as spread out the load over a wider area. We have projects that are 5 years old using these paper base panels and they look amazing still to this day. 

After our excavation we make sure that we’re down to the subsoil and have no more topsoil on that excavation floor. We can then compact the existing subsoil and then lay our non-woven style through this space. This geotextile separates our subsoil from our base material. And then we can begin to bring in our HPB or High Performance Bedding which is a 1/4 inch clean stone that allows for drainage. This material gets greeted with a 1/8 of an inch per foot slope away from the foundation. 

We can then start to lay our paver base panels on top of this screeded bedding layer in a staggered pattern. We then lay our pavers on top of the paver base panels and these panels make it easier to lay our pavers because we can walk anywhere through this surface without disturbing our bedding material. 

We lay out our pavers and then complete cuts where necessary. There are many curved cuts around the window sills and then a complete row of cuts along the fence because the fence is not completely square to the house. We save time by laying past our border paver and then drawing a line from 1 point to another and cut our pavers in place. We then remove our cut waste and drop our border pavers in place. 

We install a plastic edge restraint that contains our pavers and prevents horizontal movement of those pavers over time. Along the fence this edge restraint is required. We cannot fully pave to the edge of the fence. Additionally our pavers need at least 6 in of base material to sit upon so that any future settlement will not affect the movement of our pavers away from the patio. Paving right to the edge of the fence will cause failure to the system over time. What we do in this case is we dress up the side of our pavers between the pavement and the fence with a crushed black granite stone to match the color tones of our patio. That way our edge restraint is not exposed and visible to anyone looking at it.

We then used a permeable joint and compound that is installed with water. This allows that water to move freely through the joints onto our paver base panels and following our slope away from the foundation towards that fence area. 

For this project our client chose a smooth three-piece paver in Shale gray color for both the field and the border of the project. Some clients choose a darker border paver color to contrast the field but in this case our clients wanted something that would be more subtle. We help our clients through the product selection by meeting them at our Stone supplier talking through their decisions and then providing them with samples at their house so that they can see what that product will look like up against their house. 

Our client is left with a beautiful space that allows for their storage of anything that they need at the side of their house.

Materials Used:
Techo-Bloc Blu 60 Shale Grey Smooth