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Paver Patios · Ballard
In Ballard the patio is usually the garden rather than a part of it. On lots of three to five thousand square feet with a hundred-year-old house on them, the back garden is frequently under eight hundred square feet, shaded by the house on one side and a neighbour on the other, and permanently damp from October. A lawn in that space is high-maintenance and looks tired; a well-proportioned paved surface is what actually gets used. Two Ballard-specific things shape the build. Access is genuinely tight — narrow side returns, no off-street parking, everything by hand. And the ground is frequently sandier outwash rather than till, which occasionally means less base depth than the rest of the city needs.
Paver apron and planted strip across the front of a house on an older residential street
What we get called about
Ballard is small lots and good drainage, which is close to the opposite of the rest of Seattle. The typical job here is not holding a slope or fixing a bog — it is making a compact rectangle behind a hundred-year-old house genuinely usable. That means more paved surface than people expect, a turf or lawn area smaller than instinct suggests, and enough planting depth at the boundary to make the space feel enclosed rather than merely small. The one real constraint is access: the older streets have narrow side returns and no off-street parking, so material handling shapes the schedule.
Worth knowing in Ballard
Measure for the chairs, not the table. The most common regret on a small Ballard patio is a surface sized to the table footprint with no clearance to pull a chair out and stand up — roughly a metre beyond the table edge on each usable side is what makes it work.
The method
The sequence does not change between neighbourhoods — what changes is the ground it is applied to. Full detail on the paver patios service page.
Before anything is dug we work out where the water is going to go. A patio should shed water away from the house at a fall you cannot feel underfoot but the rain can find.
Deeper than most people expect — the finished surface is the top of a build-up, not a layer laid on the lawn.
Crushed rock in compacted lifts. This is where the job is won or lost and it is the layer a cheap quote thins down.
A consistent bedding course over the compacted base, screeded rather than eyeballed.
Units laid to the pattern, cut cleanly at the edges, and locked in with edge restraint so the field cannot creep outward over time.
Jointing sand vibrated in so the surface acts as one interlocked field rather than a collection of loose units.
What it costs in Ballard
Ballard patios are small in area and the cost sits disproportionately in handling. On a street with no driveway, base rock, sand and pavers come off the kerb by hand and must be cleared the same day, which is real crew time on a job whose material bill is modest. The offset is that on genuine outwash ground the base build-up is sometimes shallower than the citywide standard — we test rather than assume, because it is worth knowing either way.
You pay after the project is fully completed.
The estimate you sign is the price you pay.
Spread the cost with no interest.
Covers hardscape work; vegetation excluded.
Local questions
General questions about this service are on the service page. These are the ones that only come up here.
Sometimes, and it is genuinely worth testing rather than assuming either way. Much of Ballard and Crown Hill sits on glacial outwash rather than the dense till under most of Seattle, and where the ground drains freely the base is doing less drainage work, so it can occasionally be shallower than the citywide six-to-eight-inch standard. But outwash is not universal here and pockets of till turn up mid-block. We do a percolation test as part of the assessment, because it changes both the specification and the price, and getting it wrong in the optimistic direction is what produces a patio that pumps.
Bigger than the instinct, and usually most of the garden. Under about four hundred square feet a lawn in this position is shaded, damp, worn where people walk and needs a mower stored on a lot with nowhere to store one. Paving the majority and keeping any green as a small planted or turf area consistently produces a space that gets used more. The dimension that matters is clearance: a table for four or six needs roughly a metre beyond the table edge on the sides people use, which is more than most small patios allow for.
By hand, with planning. Most of the older Ballard streets have no driveway, narrow side returns and restricted parking, so a pallet cannot sit on the kerb for three days. We time deliveries to what can be cleared and moved through to the back the same day, arrange any street occupation permission needed, and sequence the work so the frontage is not obstructed longer than necessary. Where a side return will not take a barrow, the route is through the house on floor protection. It adds crew hours rather than complexity, and it is in the estimate.
Get the water off it and the texture right. Moss and algae grow on surfaces that stay wet, so a patio laid dead flat — or one that has settled into a slight dish — will be slippery no matter how often it is cleaned. A cross-fall of a fraction of an inch per foot sheds water sideways into planting and lets the surface dry between rainfalls. Beyond that, a textured paver is far less treacherous than a smooth sawn one, and cutting back planting that overhangs a shaded surface makes a real difference. In deep permanent shade, texture plus an annual clean is the realistic answer.
Serving Ballard and surrounding neighbourhoods
Ballard Avenue · Sunset Hill · Loyal Heights · Whittier Heights · West Woodland · Adams · Crown Hill edge
98107 · 98117
Recent work
HardscapingView full sizeSegmental block walls terracing the grade at the front of a modern building, with a stone column, handrails to code and a paved approach — commercial hardscaping, where the walls have to take footfall as well as soil.
Retaining WallsView full sizeA wall run the whole length of a fence line to win back a flat strip of garden. Ballard lots are narrow, so the width this recovers is width the garden genuinely did not have.
WalkwaysView full sizeA side return too narrow for a full path. Large slabs floated in washed rock give a route through and let the ground either side carry on taking water.
Artificial TurfView full sizeArtificial turf pinned into a brick paver border so the edge cannot lift or curl. The grape trellis and the raised planter were part of the same job.
We come out, look at the ground, and put a fixed written price together. No deposit, and it does not change once agreed.
Free estimate
Three minutes on the form. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM, and we come out and look at the site before quoting anything.
Or call (425) 533-9734
Thank you — we have your details. We reply during office hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM. If it is urgent, call (425) 533-9734.
