Patios in Boscombe

Clearing out comes first. Old concrete, 1970s pressed flags on sand, crazy paving, a raised bed and tree roots all have to go. Behind a Boscombe villa that usually means bags and a barrow down a side passage or through a communal hall, boarded and sheeted, to a skip or a grab lorry at the kerb. Made ground and old rubble are common behind the older houses and get priced by the load, not guessed.

The base. We dig to a firm formation, lay a geotextile membrane where the ground is soft, then bring MOT Type 1 up in compacted layers. One deep dump of hardcore under a whacker plate leaves the bottom loose, and that is where a rocking slab starts.

Porcelain. Twenty millimetre calibrated porcelain suits most Boscombe courtyards. It takes in almost no water, so algae struggle to hold, and a textured finish keeps its grip when wet. It goes on a full mortar bed with a slurry primer brushed on the back of every slab, never on dabs.

Natural stone. Sandstone is warm and easy to cut, but it is porous. Granite is dense and hard wearing. Limestone and travertine are quieter in colour and mark more easily. Hand cut stone varies in thickness, so the bed does the levelling; calibrated stone lays faster.

Falls, levels and the damp proof course. The surface falls away from the house and finishes at least two courses below the DPC, as Approved Document C expects. Where a back door sits low, as it often does on a converted villa, the answer is a step down or an ACO style channel drain across the threshold, not paving built up against the wall.

Where the water goes. A walled courtyard has nowhere soft to shed runoff, and a soakaway rarely fits in a garden this size. The usual answer is a channel to an existing gully, or a permeable build up where the ground allows.

Edges, steps and jointing. A border or edging holding soil back is haunched in concrete, and steps go off a proper footing with a coping or bullnose front. Joints are filled with a brush in compound or a slurry grout depending on the stone, and the slabs cleaned before it sets.

Repairs. Lifting and re-bedding a sunken bay, cutting out cracked slabs and repointing washed out joints are all worth doing on their own. We would talk you out of new slabs laid over cracked concrete, because the cracks come straight back through.

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: excavation and muck away, the sub base, the falls and where water goes, edgings and steps, the slabs themselves, and jointing on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing in a Boscombe garden is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

A patio at ground level in a house's garden is normally permitted development, and a raised platform over 300mm is not. Most homes in Boscombe are flats, which have no permitted development rights, and the garden may belong to the freeholder, so the lease comes first. Boscombe has five conservation areas of its own and the council keeps the list; a level patio in a back garden is rarely affected, but a listed building needs consent for almost anything.

Ring rather than use the form. A slab that has lifted at one corner or a step that has dropped is a trip, and a north facing patio in winter can be genuinely dangerous.

We can usually lift and re-lay the worst of it quickly, then look properly at whether the base under the rest has gone. In a Boscombe courtyard shared by a block, tell the managing agent too, since several households use the same route in the dark. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

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The middle of Boscombe is about 600 metres from the cliff top, close enough for salt to arrive on every strong south westerly. Salt holds moisture on the surface of a patio, so a paved garden here stays damp longer after rain and greens over faster than one inland.

Salt also gets into porous stone. As the stone dries the salt crystallises in the pores and flakes the face away, which is why soft sandstone in a seaward garden can look tired within a few years.

That changes what we would suggest. Porcelain and granite barely take salt in, so they keep their face and their grip. If you love sandstone, choose a dense one and accept it will want cleaning more often. Anything metal, such as a channel grating or an edging trim, should be stainless or composite rather than galvanised. And a rinse with fresh water after a stormy spell does the paving more good than any sealer.

Nearby places we also cover for patios, with straight-line distances from Boscombe, and the other trades we offer in Boscombe itself.

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