We had a client reach out to us in Mississauga wanting us to repair their paver walkway. This walkway had settled and had shown signs of movement over the past 15 years that it was built. When we start with a lift and relay of pavers we start with a pressure wash cleaning of them. This serves two purposes. One it revitalizes the surface of those pavers bringing back the color that they were and taking away all the dirt and grime that has been stored on the surface of them. It also helps us to be able to clean them efficiently while we are lifting them. Often times polymeric sand will stick to the size of the stone making it very difficult for us to clean them in the lifting process. But by pressure wash cleaning them first this loosens that polymeric sand or whatever joint fill was used so that it is easier to clean.
We then begin by lifting the stones and cleaning off the sides of them as we lift. With more cut pavers in the patio and odd shapes of the walkway we do need to set aside the pavers in the systematic way. That way we can put them down back the same way that they came up and we do not have to do any cuts in the process to get them back in place. This adds a lot of time in the process making sure that we know exactly where those papers are going to go. Luckily on this project we had enough room to stack the rows of pavers to the left on the grass. It was also easier that the pavers were laid in a running bond pattern meaning that they were in rows and not laid randomly.
In this specific projects case there is actually wall block that was used on the border as opposed to pavers in this added a lot more time in the removal and reinstallation of these because the wall block is a different height than the pavers.
We do not charge more for this added time for the project we always provide quotes for our projects and stick to that budget for our clients whenever possible. We want to provide a quality service at a fair price for our client and make sure that they know we are not going to try to charge more whenever possible unless the client changes the scope of work.
You can see that the previous contractor use stone dust as the base material for this walkway. Stone dust is a cheap aggregate for base and it should never be used underneath pavers. It will hold on to water and not drain causing lots of issues to the pavers as well as the joints. Manufacturers will not warranty their pavers on top of this material as well as polymeric sand manufacturers. The water will cause efflorescence which is a white residue on the surface of the pavers because that water is not able to move its way through the base instead it wicks its way to the surface dissolving materials in the concrete and depositing them on the surface. That water will also disintegrate the bottom of the pavers over time. That is why when we do lift and relays we can never guarantee the clients that we can reuse the pavers because we do not know what they look like on the bottom. The water will also not allow the polymeric sand to properly cure because there is always water in the system.
What we do with our lifting relays is we remove at least one inch of the existing material regardless of what it is. This removes any of that organic material that has deposited itself onto the base as well as any weeds. We then give it a good compaction and then screwed our HPB or High Performance Bedding material. This is a 1/4 inch clean that does allow for the drainage of water. We can then start to relay the pavers on top of the bedding material.
In this case, we screeded the bedding material started to lay the pavers until we got to the edge of where that wall block was. Typically we would install the wall block first but to ensure we have a tight spacing between the wall block and the pavers since this is a lift and relay we started with the pavers and then we leveled the wall block to the edge of the pavers. This means that we need to go back to that final row of pavers beside the wall block and make sure that the heights of the pavers matches the height of the wall block with a slight slope away from our foundation. We always have a 1/8 of an inch per foot to 1/4 of an inch per foot slope away from any foundation.
We reinstall the edge restraint along that wall block to make sure that there is no horizontal movement in the future so that our project is completely contained.
Once our pavers are laid we can then install our polymeric sand jointing compound. We sweep that polymeric sand around into the joints followed by a compaction of our pavers to consolidate that polymeric sand down to the bottom of the joints. Skipping this step will cause the polymeric sand to fail. That is because that sand will not reach the bottom of the joint creating air pockets that will cause future settlement of the polymeric sand and create cavities in the joints. With these tight joints we do this a step at least two or three times to make sure that we have got down to the bottom of the joint. We also want to make sure that our polymeric sand is 1/8 of an inch below the top of the paver to ensure its success. We can then blow off any remaining residue of that polymeric sand from the surface of the pavers so that it does not Harden and discolor our surface of the pavers. We then activate the polymeric sand using water and following the steps specified by the manufacturer to activate it.
And this is our final result of our project.