What Construction Shortcuts Do Most Savannah Patio Installers Take?

You have two different price quotes on your desk for what looks like the same patio, but one of them is thousands of dollars cheaper. So now you are wondering where the expensive one has unnecessary costs added on and where the cheap one is leaving something important out. The honest answer is that most of that price difference is not markup, it’s the parts of the patio you will never see, the parts underneath that get buried before the pavers are put down.

My name is Randy Thompson. I left an aerospace career to start All-Out Hardscapes LLC, and over the last 10-plus years we have built more than 150 patios, walkways, and outdoor living spaces across Savannah and the Lowcountry, from Wilmington Island to Savannah Quarters. The company is veteran-owned, and we are a certified Techo-Pro installer. We want to explain exactly where corners get cut in our business, including the ones that make our own quote look expensive when you compare it to another bid.

Here is what we’ve learned fixing lots of other people’s failed work: the patio that sinks, washes out, or grows weeds in straight lines usually didn’t fail because of the pavers on top. It failed because the installers used two or three different shortcuts underneath, and each one saved them money when they bid the job. We’ll discuss each one and tell you what it saves them, and show you why those exact corners are the ones that will fail in our wet, sandy ground.

What Are the Most Common Shortcuts a Patio Crew Can Take?

Two shortcuts are responsible for almost all of the savings, and a few smaller ones make up the rest. The big two are the base and the joint sand. A crew can take out the open-graded stone base, which means the base is made from clean, single-sized stone with gaps that let water drain through it, and then set your pavers on cheaper material that will keep water inside. And they can fill the joints between the pavers with plain sand instead of the polymeric kind that hardens and locks the whole thing together.

Underneath those two are the smaller cuts: digging shallow, compacting lightly, running a thinner edge, and skipping the slope that moves water off the surface. What they all have in common is that you don’t see any of them. When the last paver is put in and the patio looks finished, you can’t see which steps were skipped. That’s the whole problem with looking for patios for the price alone. You’re comparing two surfaces that look the same but two constructions that aren’t.

Why Does Skipping the Stone Base Save So Much, but Cost You Later?

The base is the single biggest difference between a patio that will last and one that won’t. It is also the easiest place to save money, because it’s the first thing buried.

This is how we build it. We use four inches of clean number 57 stone, then a two-inch bedding layer of clean number 789 stone, and we don’t use any sand under the pavers at all. Clean stone means that it’s washed, and the fine dust is screened out, so the pieces are all about the same size with open gaps between them. It’s what we call a four-two base.

The reason it works is drainage. The ground here is sandy on top and holds water below, and so the water doesn’t have anywhere to go and that ruins a patio. A clean-stone base works like a gravel drain: rain runs straight down through the gaps and keeps going instead of making a pool underneath the pavers. And because the stone is angular and all one size, the pieces will fit together when we compact them, so the base locks together mechanically instead of floating. A base that will drain and lock doesn’t pump up, dish out, or sink.

About 90 percent of the companies that install patios do it a different way. They put down three inches of crusher run, which is gravel mixed with stone dust, and is also called crush and run. Then they will put down two or three inches of concrete sand or basic sand and set the pavers on top of that. Crusher run and sand both hold water, and sand will move. So the day it is built, it looks the same as ours. The difference will show up in a few hard rains when the sand starts to move and the pavers move with it. Taking the clean stone out and using cheaper material is worth about $5,000 to most installers on a normal patio. That is real money, and it is invisible, and that is why it’s the first thing to go.

Why Do Installers Swap Polymeric Sand for Plain Mason Sand?

The second big thing that can be cut is in the joints, the lines of sand between each paver. If they are done right, these joints are filled with polymeric sand, which is joint sand mixed with a binder that will harden when it gets wet. Once it hardens, it makes the pavers into one tight field, seals the surface so that water can’t work its way down into the joints, and keeps weeds from rooting in the lines.

The shortcut is to skip the polymeric and fill the joints with plain mason sand, which is just loose sand with nothing in it to harden. This change saves about $1,200. The problem is the climate, because we get heavy, driving rain here, and plain sand has nothing holding it in place, so it just gets washed out of the joints whenever it storms. Once the sand is gone, the pavers lose their lock and begin to wiggle, the joints open up, weeds move into the gaps, and soon you will be out cleaning sand off of the driveway after every storm. If it is put in correctly, polymeric sand sets up and stays put through even the hard rains. The cheaper sand is a big reason so many patios around the Lowcountry look loose and patchy in just a couple of years.

The Smaller Cuts That Add Up

The base and the joints are where the most savings are for the installers, but there are a few smaller shortcuts that are used on cut-rate jobs too. They all work the same way: skip a step, save an hour or a load of material, and let the homeowner find out later.

• Digging too shallow: A proper base needs to be deep enough for the layer of stone and bedding. Taking out a few inches and calling it good leaves the base too thin to do its job.
• Light compaction: A crusher-run base has to be packed down in thin layers so that it will actually adhere together. If you dump it all at once and roll it over twice there will be voids that settle later. Clean open-graded stone is the one exception, and it gets a single firm pass instead.
• A skimpy edge restraint: Edge restraint is the border that locks the outside row of pavers in place. If you don’t use enough, or skip it altogether, the pavers will go outward and the joints that are close to the edges will open up.
• No slope for drainage: A patio should be built with a small amount of slope so water runs off instead of making a pool. If you build it completely flat you will have standing water, along with staining and slickness.

So Why Is the Cheaper Quote So Tempting?

If you add up the cost, you can see why the cheap bid is so attractive. If you take the clean stone out of the base you save around $5,000. Filling the joints with plain sand instead of polymeric will save you another $1,200 or so. The smaller changes save even more. An installer can give you those savings in two different ways. They can bid thousands under the next quote, or they can keep the price the same and give you a much bigger patio for the same cost. Either way, it looks like the better deal on paper.

And for a while, it’s the better-looking patio. A bigger area of pavers in the backyard seems like more value than a base you won’t see. But that’s the trap. You are paying less, or getting more square footage, in exchange for the parts of the patio that will determine if it’s still flat in five years. The cheaper patio isn’t a scam, exactly. It’s a different product with the same finish and you don’t get to see the difference until later when the ground shows it to you.

When Is a Cheaper Patio Actually Fine?

We aren’t going to tell you every cheaper quote is a rip-off, because that’s not true. A sand-set patio can be perfectly fine if the conditions are right. In a high, dry yard with soil that drains well on its own, a sand base is a much smaller risk. The reason it’s wrong here is because of the ground: it is low, wet, and sandy where water will sit and sand will move. The problem isn’t that sand is bad everywhere. Sand is just the wrong base for this climate.

A high price doesn’t guarantee a good base either. There are expensive quotes in this area that cut the same corners and pocket the difference. Price by itself doesn’t guarantee it’s being built right. The only way to know is to ask, and the good news is that the questions are simple.

Before you sign anything, ask the installer to put all the information about the base in writing: how deep they’re digging, what stone they will be using, and how thick the bedding layer is. Ask what goes in the joints, polymeric or plain sand. Ask how they are doing the drainage and slope. An installer who builds it right will answer all of that without a problem and will be happy to put it on the contract. If a quote doesn’t specify the base on paper, then that tells you what you need to know.

And here is one honest thing which is where our company stands. We aren’t the cheapest, and we aren’t for everyone. We’ve told plenty of homeowners that nobody is ever quite financially ready for us, and that is fair. But if your budget is fixed, a smaller patio on a real base will outlast a big one on sand every single time. We’d rather build you a patio that is 10 feet smaller and never hear from you again, because if we don’t have to come back to your house, we did the job right.