Paver Installation in Shoreline

Occasionally, and it is worth assessing rather than dismissing. If the existing slab is sound, well drained and at a level that leaves enough height for a bedding layer and the paver without fouling a threshold, an overlay is quicker, cheaper and generates no demolition waste. The conditions that rule it out are the common ones: a slab that is cracked with differential movement, one that holds water, or a level that simply does not allow the additional build-up. The tell is usually the doors — if adding the thickness of a paver and its bedding would bring the surface up to the bottom of a threshold, the slab has to come out.

It changes, and it needs to be designed rather than discovered. A step is the difference between two levels, so altering the lower one alters the step whether anyone intended it or not — and the results range from a riser that is slightly uncomfortable to one that is genuinely a hazard. On a replacement job we set the finished paving level from the fixed points first, then work out what that leaves at every step and threshold, and where the arithmetic produces an awkward riser we either adjust the paving level or rebuild the step as part of the work. It is far cheaper as part of the job than as a return visit.

Enough to be a real line rather than a rounding, and the uncertainty is the thickness. Mid-century slabs vary considerably and some are substantially thicker or more heavily reinforced than anything on the surface suggests, which changes both the machine time to break it and the tonnage to remove. Disposal is charged by weight and concrete is heavy, so a slab twice as thick as expected roughly doubles that part of the cost. We give a figure based on what can be seen and probed, state clearly what would change it, and tell you as soon as the first section comes up rather than at the end.

Almost certainly, and often that is the real reason the old one was a problem. A poured slab is impermeable and depends entirely on having been laid with the right fall — and a great many older slabs either never had one or lost it as the ground moved beneath them, which is why water stands on them. A new installation is set out with the falls decided first, and a paved surface also lets a small amount of water through the joints rather than shedding all of it. Where there is genuinely nowhere for the runoff to go, that is worth solving as part of the same job rather than moving the problem a few feet.