What Features Should Every Patio Have That Most Savannah Installers Skip?

If you’re collecting quotes for a new paver patio, you’ve probably noticed something very frustrating. You could have two crews come stand in the same backyard, look at the same project, and hand you prices that are thousands of dollars apart. What makes it worse is that the finished patio looks exactly the same on day one no matter who builds it. You won’t be able to see the difference until the third or fourth wet season, when one patio still sits flat and tight while the other starts to dip, shift, and grow weeds in the joints.

My name is Randy Thompson, and I started All-Out Hardscapes LLC. I left a career in aerospace to start this business, and over the last decade my crew and I have built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces all over Savannah and the Coastal Lowcountry, from Wilmington Island to Savannah Quarters. We are the only certified Techo-Pro installer in the Lowcountry, which is a special manufacturer certification. My method is to build it right, even in the places you’ll never see once the job is done.

So here’s what actually separates a patio that lasts from one that just looks good on day one and then fails three to five years later. It’s not the pavers you pick or the pattern you chose. It comes down to three things that will either make or break your patio. One, a real drainage base; two, polymeric joints; and three, edge restraint. Cheap installs skip all three of these things, because none of them can be seen when you do your final inspection walk-through. My goal is for you to finish reading this article and then be able to tell, before you sign anything, which kind of patio you’re actually buying.

The Three Features That Separate a Lasting Patio From a Pretty One

There is no mystery here, so we’ll give you the answer quick and simple. A patio that’s still flat and tight ten years from now has three things a cheap patio doesn’t have. That real drainage base underneath it, polymeric sand locking the joints, and edge restraint holding the perimeter. That’s it, that’s the whole list. Everything else, the color, the pattern, the size, is preference and has nothing to do with structural integrity.

And here’s why it’s so easy for companies to cut out these very important features. You can’t see a single one of them once the patio is finished because they’re under the pavers. The joint sand looks like any other sand if you don’t look super closely. The edge restraint is under the soil along the border. So when a crew wants to bid the lowest price, these are the things they shave off, because you won’t know on the walk-through. You will catch it in year three to five after they’re long gone.

Feature 1: A Real Drainage Base, Not a Bed of Sand

This is the biggest thing that is non-negotiable if you want your patio to last, and it’s the one most installers around here get wrong for some reason. In our years digging up failed patios across the Lowcountry, almost every one of them was installed incorrectly. They used about 3 inches of crush-and-run gravel (a dense mix of stone and stone dust), then 2 to 3 inches of concrete sand or plain sand, then set the pavers right on top. Doing it this way is very fast and cheap. But in our wet, sandy coastal soil, it’s exactly what will cause your patio to fail.¹

We build the base completely differently. We use what we call a four-two. All that means is 4 inches of clean number 57 stone, then a 2-inch bedding layer of clean number 789 chip stone, and no sand bedding layer at all. Number 57 is an open-graded stone, which means the pieces are all about the same size with open voids between them instead of being packed tight with dust and fine particles. It’s the same rock that gets packed around a septic leach field, and it does the same job under your patio. It lets water run straight through it instead of getting trapped against the bottom of your pavers. Done right, the whole patio drains like a French drain.

This part is important. We use number 789 chip stone for that top bedding layer, not standard number 89. They sound like they would be the same, but 789 is crushed so the pieces have jagged, ridged edges. When we run the plate compactor over it, those edges interlock with each other and lock the layer in place, the way a good gravel road knits together. Standard number 89 is rounder and it’s smooth, like fish-tank gravel, and rounded stone never really locks into itself. It moves and shifts around. When you step on it, your heel leaves a divot in the gravel. Multiply that across a whole patio and your entire surface will have issues because of all the voids and gaps under the pavers.

Compaction is a skill all by itself. We screed the number 57 so it’s nice and flat, dragging a straight edge across to level it, then we compact the full 4 inches in only one pass. We could build it up in thin layers, but we don’t do that because over-compacting actually fractures the larger stone into smaller pieces and fills in the open gaps that are essential for drainage, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. Once that base is compacted, you can drive a truck across it without leaving a mark. It sets up just like a concrete pad, and that’s the surface your pavers and polymeric sand go on. A patio can only be as flat as the base that holds it up, so this is the part of the work that makes sure you’re still happy with it in five years.

One more thing we are extremely meticulous about is keeping the stone clean. When we dig a patio out, we are pulling out dirt, and we go out of our way to keep that dirt from contaminating our number 57 and number 789 stone. The stone shows up clean, and we keep it clean until the pavers cover it. This pays off years down the road because weeds can’t grow in clean stone, since there’s no soil for a seed to root in, and the pavers cover it from above so that no dirt can fall into the cracks and cause problems. If you build it this way, it eliminates the vast majority of the weed problem before the patio is even finished.

Feature 2: Polymeric Joints That Lock the Surface Together

Once the pavers are set, something has to fill in the gaps between them, and this is the second thing most installers cut out in order to offer a cheaper price. The filler is mostly invisible and it does save money upfront to just use the cheap sand. Plenty of crews sweep in plain mason sand or play sand. It fills the gaps nicely and the day they finish the work the patio looks amazing. Then the first hard Lowcountry storm immediately washes a ton of it right back out, and you are left with loose, rocking pavers and open joints.

We use polymeric sand to fill the gaps instead. Polymeric sand is a jointing sand mixed with a binder that, once you sweep it in and mist it with water, sets up firm almost like concrete and actually holds the pavers in place instead of just sitting there between them and looking pretty. It sheds water off the surface rather than letting it pour down into the joints, it doesn’t wash out in heavy rain, and because the joints stay tight and sealed, weed seeds and ants have nowhere to settle in from the top. And when it’s built on a clean stone base, you end up with a surface locked from both directions. Nothing growing up from below, and nothing washing out from above.

Feature 3: Edge Restraint That Keeps the Patio From Spreading

The third feature goes around the entire border of your patio, and most people have never even heard of it, which is exactly why it’s so easy for installers to just leave out. Edge restraint is a sturdy edging, most often a heavy spiked strip, installed along the outside perimeter and pinned down into the base to hold that outer row of pavers in place.

This is extremely important because a paver patio is not one solid slab. It is hundreds of individual pieces held together by friction and tight joints. Without something around the outside holding it in place, the outer edges have nothing to push back against, so over time, every time something rolls or steps across them, the border pavers slowly creep outward. The joints near the edge open up, you start getting dirt and weeds and gaps, and then that spreads as it works its way inward. A patio can have a decent base and still come apart at the edges if nobody did anything to restrain them. It’s a small material cost and only about an hour of labor to do this. Skipping it is one of the most common reasons a patio looks old and worn in its early years.

How Can You Tell If an Installer Actually Builds This Way?

Since you can’t see any of these three features after the job is finished, the time to find them is before you sign anything or pay. You don’t have to be a contractor, you just need to ask a few direct questions and listen for whether the answers come back specific or vague. Ask any installer you are considering these exact questions.

• What is going into the base, and how deep? You want to hear a real open-graded stone like number 57 with a clean chip-stone bedding layer, not just “gravel and sand.”
• Do you set the pavers on sand or on stone? A sand bedding layer will be the reason your patio sinks in our soil.
• What are you filling the joints with? Polymeric sand should be the answer, never plain mason or play sand.
• How will you restrain the edges? You want a clear description of perimeter edge restraint pinned into the base, not someone who looks at you like they don’t know what you’re talking about.

A crew that builds patios to last will answer those quickly and in detail, because it’s what they do every day. A crew that planned to cut those corners will get vague, or try to distract you by changing the subject, or tell you that it doesn’t really matter. It absolutely matters here more than almost anywhere else, because our wet, sandy soil wreaks havoc on a weak base. Much worse than dry, stable ground.

Where We Will Be Straight With You

We’re not going to tell you that a patio set on sand falls apart the day after it is built because it doesn’t. Plenty of them look great for the first couple of years, which is exactly why this is so hard to shop for. The problems don’t show up until around year three or four, after enough wet seasons have pushed water through a base that was never built to help it drain out.

And here’s the part most contractors will never tell you. None of these three features require the most expensive pavers or the biggest budget. It’s about using the correct method, not paying extra for a luxury. A modest patio built on a real stone base, with polymeric joints and locked edges, will outlast a showpiece set on sand every single time. So if a quote comes in low, the right question is not whether the crew is cheap. You need to find out whether they’re cutting out the three important things you’ll never see. We’re not the cheapest crew in town, and we won’t pretend to be. What we will tell you is that we build it once, to last a lifetime, so we don’t ever have to come back. The way we see it, if we never have to come back to your house, we did our job right.