Paving repairs anywhere in Perth, on paving that has sunk, started to rock or opened at the joints. It gets taken up and relaid properly, it is about half of what we do, and it is almost always a base problem wearing a paving problem's clothes.
Send us your paving
A photo of the worst bit tells us most of it.
Three versions of the same job, depending on how much of it has gone and whether the pavers themselves are worth keeping.
We work between Two Rocks and Mandurah, on paving we did not lay as readily as on paving we did.
Full relay
The whole area comes up, the base is corrected and compacted, and it goes back down on a full mortar bed. The fix that does not come back.
Lift and re-level a section
Where one area has dropped and the rest is sound. Cheaper than a full relay and the right answer more often than people expect.
Take up and replace
When the pavers themselves are past it, or you have wanted them gone for years anyway. New material onto a base that has finally been done properly.
Paving fails in a small number of ways and each one points at a different layer. None of these is fixed by cleaning it.
Usually it can. Lift the sunken pavers, throw sand under them, tamp them back down, and the area is flat again by the afternoon. It is genuinely cheaper and it genuinely works, for a while.
What it does not do is change why they sank. The base that consolidated once will consolidate again, and the sand that washed out will keep washing out, so a patch buys a season or two and then you are looking at the same dish in the same spot.
So we do not quote patch repairs. If the base is the problem, we say so and we quote the relay; if it turns out only one area has moved and the rest is sound, we quote that area and leave the rest alone. Either way you are told which of the two it is before there is a price on it.
Three to five days on a typical backyard, most of it in the first two steps.
Pavers come up by hand and are stacked where they can be sorted. This is also when we find out how much of the base is salvageable.
Bedding sand comes out entirely. Leaving it in is how a relay ends up failing in the same way the original did.
Soft spots are dug out and made up, the whole base is compacted in layers, and the falls are reset. This is the part being paid for.
Full mortar bed under every paver. Nothing bridges a void this time, so there is nothing left to drop.
Joints filled solid so sand cannot wash out and ants cannot get under it. The surface behaves as one piece rather than a few thousand pieces.
Often, and it makes a real difference to the price. What decides it is the material and how they were laid, not how old they are.
Clay and concrete pavers off a sand bed. They lift clean, brush off, and a few breakages at the edges are normal and easily made up.
Natural stone off a sand bed. Travertine and limestone chip at the arrises coming up, so expect to lose some and to need a few replacements that will not quite match.
Anything already bedded in mortar or glued to a slab. Getting it off intact costs more than the pavers are worth, and porcelain in particular tends to come up in pieces.
We will tell you which of the three you have before the job starts, and we will tell you honestly if reusing them is going to cost more in labour than replacing them.
A picture of the sunken section, one of the whole area, and roughly how big it is. If it only needs one area lifted rather than the lot, we will tell you that.
