DIY Patio vs. Hiring a Pro in Savannah: What Can Go Wrong?

You have priced a pallet of pavers at the supply yard, watched a couple of installs on video, and done the math. The materials are just a small part of the quotes you’ve been getting, and the work looks like something a patient person with a long weekend and a rented compactor could do themselves. That’s a fair estimate of everything you can see, but it tells you almost nothing about how long a paver patio will stay flat.

My name is Randy Thompson, and I’m the founder of All-Out Hardscapes LLC. We’ve built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Coastal Lowcountry over the past 10 years, from Wilmington Island to Savannah Quarters, and I’m a Techo-Bloc Pro certified installer, the installer certification run by paver manufacturer Techo-Bloc. I also spend part of every year dealing with the other part of this question, standing in a back yard figuring out how much of somebody’s patio has to come out.

My response to what can go wrong isn’t a list of mistakes a beginner might make. A crooked cut takes 10 minutes to fix. What goes wrong when a homeowner builds their own patio is the soil that is 4 to 6 inches below the surface. It shows up in about three to five years, and then in order to fix the problem the whole patio has to be taken apart.

If I Build My Own Patio, What Actually Goes Wrong?

It’s the base that goes wrong, not the pattern, not the cuts, not the edge restraint, which is the plastic or metal border that keeps the outside row of pavers from moving outward. The material between your dirt and your pavers is the whole issue, and it’s the part a homeowner has the least information about, because most instructions are only one line: compact some gravel, screed some sand, set your pavers.

Here’s the simple answer: a homeowner-built patio in this soil fails because it’s built on sand, and sand moves when water moves. It won’t fail the weekend you finish. It will be tight and level and look just like it’s supposed to. But it will fail in three to five years, when the individual pavers begin to sit at different heights and tip in random directions. Nobody sees the consequence of a problem with the base until 3 seasons of rain have gone through it.

The second thing that goes wrong is physical. A pallet of pavers weighs close to a ton, and the stone for the base will arrive by the ton before a single paver is put down. All of it crosses your lawn to get to the back yard. We use a machine for our jobs, but if the homeowner is doing it themselves, that would probably mean a wheelbarrow is going across the grass in the same line for two or three weekends, and that leaves a mark on the lawn.

What Sits Under the Pavers Is What Keeps Them Flat

Any base in this climate needs to do two things: it has to let water go through and get out, and it has to hold the pavers at a certain height while it does that. In sandy soil that stays wet, those two things work against each other, and the normal build loses.

Based on what we see going in around here and what we have to re-do, about 9 out of 10 installs use sand. This means there is three inches of crush-and-run, which is crushed gravel mixed with stone dust that makes almost a solid layer, then two to three inches of concrete sand for the bedding layer that the pavers will sit on, and then more sand is put into the joints between them.

When the first hard rain comes, the sand will start being pulled out of the joints. Once the joints are empty, water isn’t running off the surface, it’s going straight down into the bedding sand. If you’ve ever dumped a bucket of water out on the beach, you’ve seen what happens next: the water cuts a channel and takes the sand with it. Crush-and-run won’t let water pass through, so it sits in that sand layer, follows the slope, and takes sand with it the entire way. After three to five years like that, the pavers have nothing holding them at a fixed height.

There’s more than one base design that works here, and each one has to do the same two things: let the water move through it and out, and keep a movable layer out from under the pavers. Ours fixes the second by taking out the sand completely.

We call it a four-two internally. On the plan it’s an open-graded base, which means the stone is cut so the gaps between the pieces stay open and water goes right through. We put down 4 inches of clean #57 stone, then 2 inches of clean #789 chip stone as the bedding layer, and the pavers go directly on that. Clean means washed, with no fines in it. Fines are the powdery small particles that plug the gaps and turn a base that drains into a base that holds water.

The #789 is three types of stone that’s blended together, and it is chip stone, so every piece has jagged edges. When you run a plate compactor over it, which is the walk-behind machine that vibrates loose material into place, the pieces of stone lock together because there are ridges for the next rock to grab. Standard 89 stone is rounded, closer to fish-tank gravel. Step on rounded stone in a soft-soled shoe and your heel leaves a small hole, because round rock rolls under the weight.

This same idea determined how we compact the #57. We screed the full depth, which means we level it to a consistent thickness with a straight edge, rake it, and run it in one pass instead of a couple of inches at a time. Lifts sound like they would be more thorough, but the result is the opposite: the compactor keeps working stone that’s already locked and starts breaking big stone into small stone, which is just what you wanted to keep out. It should be done in one pass, because then the #789 gets screeded flatter and compacted again, and it will be like a concrete pad. Polymeric sand, which is sand with a binder, goes into the joints on top and will set when you wet it and lock the joints the way grout locks tile.

How Should I Compare Doing It Myself Against Hiring a Crew?

The cost is why this question gets asked, but cost isn’t the difference between the two outcomes. There are four things to think about whether you are pricing your own weekends or reading somebody’s proposal.

Those four are what goes under the pavers, how material gets from the driveway to the back yard, what the property looks like when the work is done, and what the patio looks like in three to five years.

Building It Yourself

The base is the one decision you can’t rent. You can rent a plate compactor for the day and buy #57 stone from the same place we get ours. The rental will come with the standard sand. Crush-and-run over a sand bedding layer is the normal build that the real crews use every week. But it’s also the one that causes the failure above.

The material moves by hand. There will be close to a ton of pavers per pallet, base stone by the ton, and the sod and dirt that’s dug out, all going across your lawn one load at a time.

The property shows that. You will use the same track across the same grass over several weekends in soil that holds water, and it will leave a rut that’s part of the project. To re-sod that strip will cost money, and that’s a cost the homeowner math leaves out.

In year three to five, you are responsible for everything. If the pavers tilt, you have to pay for the diagnosis, the demolition, and the rebuild, and the rebuild is going to be more expensive than the original, because now there’s a finished patio in the way.

Hiring a Certified Installer

The base stops being a step you make up as you go along, and becomes part of the project you can ask about. Ask any crew what goes under the pavers, how thick, and whether there is sand in the bedding layer. Ours is 4 inches of clean #57 stone and 2 inches of #789 chip stone with no sand, and we will explain the reasoning to anyone before we price the job.

The material moves by machine. We run a wheeled machine with an extending boom rather than a tracked one, which puts us among just a select few crews in the Lowcountry who do it that way. The boom reaches roughly eight feet past where the machine sits and lifts close to a full pallet, so material goes where it’s needed instead of being relayed across the yard.

On one job we were there for two weeks with no tire marks and no track marks left in the lawn, so the property came through it well. That’s the difference between finishing your patio and finishing your patio and then having to fix your yard.

In three to five years, the mechanism that causes the pavers to tilt isn’t there. An open-graded base doesn’t have a movable layer, so water goes through the joints, through the stone, and out.

When you read about those four in contrast to one another, the pattern holds. These are not the same job at two prices. They’re two different builds that look the same for about three years.

What Happens If My Patio Moves and I Have to Redo It?

This is the part of the cost nobody figures on, and it’s worth calculating first, because tearing work out and rebuilding is what we do on a regular basis. We tear out a lot of work that got built the fast way.

One job we took on was a patio built on a sand base that had washed out completely. The pavers were still good, so we took the whole thing apart, rebuilt the base underneath, pressure washed the pavers, and then reset them. That’s the better version: the surface is fine, and what you pay for the second time is the demolition and the base you should’ve had in the first place.

The other situation leaves you nothing. We took out a deck poured as a concrete slab and then cut by hand to look like paver joints. They’d carved those lines into the wet concrete with a spoon, and every one was crooked. There was nothing to save in a slab, so it all went out as demolition before the real work could be started.

Neither example is meant to scare you off a shovel. The honest comparison isn’t the cost of the materials versus a proposal. It’s your material bill, plus your weekends, plus the risk of paying for demolition and a base a second time in year four. When that math still favors doing it yourself, do it yourself.

When Does Building It Myself Actually Make Sense?

This happens more often than you’d expect a contractor to admit. We aren’t the least expensive quote you’ll get, and on a small project we shouldn’t be. Sometimes the base doesn’t determine the best way forward, and an afternoon with a shovel might suffice.

• A stepping-stone path or garden border, where if a stone settles half an inch you can re-level it yourself.
• A small pad for a grill, a generator, or an air conditioner, where the surface doesn’t have to be a continuous plane.
• A gravel or crushed-stone sitting area, where there isn’t a rigid flat surface to start with.
• A patio you’re willing to build the harder way, on an open-graded stone base rather than a sand one, and you have the weekends free to compact it right.

The dividing line isn’t skill or size. It’s whether the finished surface has to stay flat and level, and whether you could live with the fix if it doesn’t. Once it has to stay flat, the base isn’t just a step in the project, it starts being the project.