Patios in Canford Cliffs

Terraces behind the big houses. Many gardens in Canford Cliffs are large, and the patio is often a wide terrace running the length of the house, sometimes with steps down to a lawn. Large format porcelain suits that: dense, low maintenance and easy to keep clean.

Sandstone and limestone look softer but are porous and green over faster in shade. Granite, flamed or bush hammered, is the hardest wearing natural stone and keeps its grip wet. Calibrated slabs cost a little more but lay faster and flatter than hand cut.

The dig and the base. Old slabs, old concrete, roots and any made ground come out. Then a geotextile membrane and MOT Type 1 in compacted layers, and every slab on a full wet mortar bed with a slurry primer on the back. Slabs laid on dabs rock and crack, and a wide terrace shows every one.

Levels, steps and thresholds. The patio falls away from the house and finishes at least two courses below the damp proof course, the level Approved Document C works to. Where the garden drops away we build a retaining edge and proper steps with a bullnose or coping, and where a back door sits low we fit a channel drain at the threshold instead of raising the paving against the wall.

Drainage. A big terrace sheds a lot of water. It runs to a border, a channel with an outfall to a gully, or a soakaway, judged against Approved Document H, and we test before we rely on one.

Flats and communal gardens. A lot of homes in Canford Cliffs are flats. A ground floor flat's terrace or a shared garden usually belongs to the freeholder, so they agree the work first, and materials may have to come through a communal hall or round the car park by barrow. We quote that route as its own line.

Repairs. Lifting and re-bedding rocking slabs, cutting out cracked ones, raking out and re-pointing joints with a brush in compound, and cleaning off algae and efflorescence. If a clean and new jointing will do, that is what we quote.

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 is left open or unusable overnight in a Canford Cliffs garden. 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 in a back garden is usually permitted development for a house. A raised terrace or platform, a big change of level or a retaining wall can bring in planning permission or building control. Flats do not have the same rights, so work to a communal garden needs the freeholder and sometimes the council. Parts of Canford Cliffs sit in a conservation area, which matters more for anything seen from the road; the council keeps the list shows the boundaries.

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. Under big trees the worst of it is usually wet needles lying on a green film, so sweep and rinse the route to the back door before anyone walks it. 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.

Call now: 07435 839745

Much of Canford Cliffs is thick with mature trees, pines above all: the council's appraisal for the Branksome Park and Chine Gardens conservation area traces them back to the planting of the 1800s. They are a large part of why the gardens look the way they do, and they change how a patio behaves.

Needles drop all year and pack into open joints, where they rot down and feed moss. Shade under the canopy keeps the surface damp, so algae grows. And roots run shallow and a long way out from the trunk.

So near the Canford Cliffs pines we would joint with a brush in compound rather than sand, choose textured porcelain or flamed granite that sheds needles and keeps its grip, and keep a new terrace out of the root area where we can. Where it has to go close, we dig by hand, keep the main roots and raise the build rather than dig it deep. Work to a tree in the conservation area needs six weeks' notice to the council first, and cutting into its main roots can count as work to the tree.

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

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