Patios in Cadnam and Bartley

Taking the old one up. The original 1970s flags, an old concrete apron, brick paviours or a raised bed built against the wall all come out first. We dig to firm formation, clear roots and made ground, and the spoil is loaded into a grab lorry or a skip and leaves with us. Where a previous patio has been laid on top of an older one, both usually have to go.

The sub base. Geotextile separator over soft ground, then MOT Type 1 in compacted layers of about 100mm rather than one deep dump of hardcore. That single decision is the difference between a patio that stays flat and one that is rocking in three winters.

The threshold. Where a sliding door sits low, the paving goes down with a drainage channel across the opening and a positive fall away from it, so the finished surface can stay clear of the damp course. Approved Document C is why we hold two courses below the DPC wherever the garden allows, and a channel is how you get that clearance back when it does not.

Porcelain. Calibrated twenty millimetre porcelain is what most people here choose now. It is dense, takes almost no water and keeps its grip wet if the finish is textured. It is laid on a full bed of mortar over a slurry primed back, never on dabs, because the voids under a dabbed slab crack it.

Stone. Sandstone is the warmest and the easiest to work, but porous, so it stains and greens on a shaded side. Limestone is quieter and marks with iron. Granite is dense and hard wearing. Travertine is a poor choice in a Forest winter. Hand cut stone varies in thickness so the mortar bed does the levelling; calibrated stone is sawn to a single depth.

Falls and where the water goes. A patio falls away from the building, never along the wall. From there the water needs somewhere to go on your own land: an existing gully proved to still run, a soakaway where the ground drains, or a permeable build with an open graded base and permeable jointing so the runoff never reaches the road.

Edges and steps. Edging bedded and haunched in concrete, a coping on a low retaining wall where the lawn stands higher, a kerb line where the paving meets grass, and a gravel border along the house. Steps are set out before the paving, because on a bungalow plot they set the whole level.

Jointing and repairs. Hand pointing in a matched mortar or a brush in compound worked into a full joint; a grout made for dense units on porcelain. We also do the small jobs alone: a rocking slab re-bedded, a sunken bay rebuilt, cracked units swapped, failed jointing raked out and a slippery terrace cleaned and re-graded.

Same team from first visit to last, one person to ring, and no sub-contracting your work out to somebody you have never met. 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 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.

The New Forest National Park Authority is the planning authority for these villages, and its design scrutiny is tighter than a district council's on anything visible from the road, although a patio behind a house is normally permitted development. There are around ten listed entries in the area and no conservation area over the housing itself; the NPA property map shows what applies to an address.

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. If water has started coming in at the sliding door, ring, because that is a levels problem and it gets worse every time it rains. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Call now: 07435 839745

The stock here is largely late 1960s and early 1970s, with a big share of detached houses and bungalows, and that generation of house was built with generous glazing onto the garden and a very shallow step out. Nobody planned for the patio to be topped up twice in fifty years, which is exactly what has happened to a lot of them.

The result is a terrace sitting level with, or above, the damp proof course. Rain that lands on the paving has nowhere to run except back at the wall and under the door, and the brickwork behind it stays wet because the paving is bridging the very thing that was there to stop it. Once that has been going on a few years you get damp on the inside face, not just a puddle outside.

So on this housing the first thing we work out is not the material. It is where the damp course sits, how much fall we can build in from the door to the garden, and whether the answer is a drainage channel across the threshold, a step down, or lowering the whole terrace. Get that right and the paving choice is genuinely a free one. Get it wrong and the best porcelain on the market will still send water into your kitchen.

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