How Should I Prepare for a Patio Consultation? (A Pinterest Board Is Enough)

You’ve been saving pictures for months: a fire pit from an online post, a curved walkway from another one, and a color for pavers you saw in a Facebook video. You’re ready to make a call to someone, but you’re wondering if you will need measurements, a drawing, or a finished plan before you speak with a contractor.

My name is Randy Thompson. I left an aerospace career to start All Out Hardscapes & Lighting Solutions, and over the last 10-plus years my crews and I 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 the only Techo-Bloc Pro certified installer in the Lowcountry.

Every article we write ends the same way: bring us your ideas, even if they’re just from a Pinterest board. The preparation for the first visit with us is much simpler than you would expect, and the visit itself accomplishes more of the work than you’d think.

Is a Pinterest Board Really Enough to Start a Patio Project?

Yes. Most of the time, a customer has a Pinterest board where they’ve saved their ideas, and they give it to us and say, “I want this one, this one, and this one all together.” That combination is the start of a plan, and it’s the most useful thing you can give us before we visit your property.

You don’t need a drawing, a paver name, or a layout. Those things are our job. What we need is to understand what you have in mind, and saved photos will show us that faster than anything you might describe over the phone. If you’ve got a board full of pins and no idea whether any of it will work in your yard, you’re in the same spot where most of our customers start.

What Should I Send You Before the Visit?

Send whatever you’ve been saving. Almost everyone who calls us has a board on Pinterest or is in the process of putting one together. Or they saw something on Facebook that they liked. And if you have a video, send us the link to the video so we can envision what you want.

Sending it ahead will change our first visit. Before we meet with you, we’ll study the photos and videos, so we come with pavers already picked out that look like what you saved. We can skip the part where you go through a catalog standing in your driveway and go straight to your yard.

How the Visit Gets Set

When you call, Claire in our front office will answer the phone. Her job when she first talks to you is to schedule a one-on-one consultation at your property. If you reach us first through a message or a comment, we’ll give you Claire’s number right away so she can get you scheduled on the calendar.

A lot of homeowners are coming straight from work when we meet, so we’ve been working later to accommodate their schedules. Our office hours are Monday through Saturday, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. And while the visit is on the calendar, we ask the same question each time: is there a way you can send us some of the things you’ve been seeing?

Who Should Be There When You Walk My Property?

The person with the idea. Before we give a quote, we want to know who’s going to be making the decision, because most of our questions and most of our attention will go to the person who wants the patio. If two people make that decision together, then we’d like both of them there. A plan built around one person’s pictures and approved by someone who didn’t see them may be a plan that has to be redrawn.

Besides the photos and the right people, three things make a first visit work better for any homeowner, with any contractor:

• A rough idea of where you want the patio to be
• An idea of how you would like to use the space day to day
• A budget range you’re comfortable spending

None of these have to be exact. They give us a space to fit your pictures into, and they keep our discussion honest from our first meeting.

What If My Dream Patio Doesn’t Match My Budget?

Everybody has some sort of vision, and everybody’s got a dream. Those are two different things. One is centered around a budget, and the other one is directed by the dream. Plenty of homeowners decide that the dream patio is too much for the budget before we’ve talked about a single cost.

So at the consultation, we will ask you about both the vision and the dream. The reason is that simple math is going to decide what gets built in your backyard. If we only hear the budget version, the dream won’t make it to the drawing. If we hear both, then snippets of the dream will make it into the patio even when the whole thing doesn’t fit. We design your dream vision with the money you have to spend.

So bring the dream pictures along with the practical ones. The photos you think are too expensive are the ones that show us which things matter the most to you, and those are the things worth keeping when we set the budget.

The Techo-Bloc Book Comes to the Door

We have a Techo-Bloc book that shows every paver and every color, and we’ll give it to you when we meet up, with a few pages already highlighted. These are the pavers that look like what you sent us. At the bottom of each page there’s a QR code, the square barcode your phone camera reads, and it lets you view that paver in your own backyard and check the color against your house.

That’s the reward for sending your photos ahead. The book will be open to those pages when we visit your yard, so you can compare them with your house color and your pictures from the first minute.

What Will I Walk Away With After the Consultation?

Your paver questions, answered. Once people have that conversation with us, their only questions are about the cost. They don’t have questions about pavers anymore, because we figure that out together before we leave.

After that, the design work begins. We make job blueprints off our renderings, the drawings that show your finished patio on your house. We get your building documents and lay your house out based on surveys and everything we can get from the county. We’ve been doing that design work for free.

Is All Out the Right Fit for My Project?

Maybe not, and we’d rather you know that before the visit. We’re not the cheapest guys. Nobody is ever quite financially ready for us. If your project is a small one, maybe a few hundred dollars to level a place in the yard, then we’re not the company for you. We would recommend another company that is better suited for that.

We are the right company for a homeowner with a vision, even a rough one, who would like an outdoor space built once that will last. If that’s you, then the Pinterest board is all you need to get the conversation started.