Patios in East Boldre

The dig. Old concrete, tired flags on a sand bed, a raised bed, made ground, or roots spreading in from a boundary all come out first. On this ground we excavate until the formation stops moving under a boot rather than to a number written on a quote, and that is often deeper than people expect. Spoil is wet and heavy, so it is loaded to a grab lorry or a skip and leaves with us.

Separator and sub base. A geotextile membrane goes over soft formation so the stone cannot work its way down into it, then MOT Type 1 in compacted layers of about 100mm. That separator is the difference between a base that stays a base and one that slowly becomes part of the peat under it.

Porcelain. Calibrated twenty millimetre porcelain is the sensible choice on damp ground: it absorbs almost nothing, so algae have very little to hold and frost has nothing to open up. Full bed of mortar over a slurry primed back, never dabs, because a void under a dense slab becomes a crack the first time something heavy lands on it.

Stone. Sandstone is warm, easy to cut and forgiving, but porous, so on a shaded plot it greens. Limestone is more uniform and marks with iron. Granite is the densest and the least likely to move once it is bedded. Travertine will not enjoy a wet winter here. Hand cut stone varies in thickness so the bed does the levelling; calibrated stone is sawn to one depth and lays faster.

Falls and the damp proof course. The paving runs away from the building rather than along the wall, and it finishes two courses below the DPC where the garden allows, which is what Approved Document C is for. Water goes to a gully that has been proved to run, a soakaway where the ground will genuinely take it, or a permeable build with an open graded base so the runoff stays put.

Edges and retaining. On soft ground the edge is not optional. Edging is bedded and haunched in concrete, a coping caps a low retaining wall, a kerb line separates paving from grass, and a gravel border along the house takes the drip. Without a restrained edge the outer course walks and the jointing opens.

Jointing. Stone gets hand pointing in a matched mortar or a brush in compound worked into a full joint. Porcelain takes a grout made for a dense unit. Joints filled short are how water gets into the bed, and on wet ground that is the start of the staining and the frost lifting.

Repairs. Re-bedding rocking slabs, rebuilding a sunken bay, replacing cracked units, raking out failed jointing and correcting falls on a terrace that will not dry.

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 here, not the district, and East Boldre sits inside the Forest South East conservation area, so anything visible from the road gets more design scrutiny than it would elsewhere. The NPA's property map shows what applies to an address. A garden patio is not building control work, though a connection into existing drainage can be.

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. A photograph taken in the wet is worth more to us than a dry survey, because it shows exactly where the ground is holding water. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Call now: 07435 839745

Out towards the open forest the topsoil sits over ground that stays damp most of the year and squashes under load. That is fine for grass and poor for paving. A patio needs a formation that does not move, and here that is usually further down than a standard build allows for.

The practical consequence is that the dig and the stone are a bigger share of the price than the slabs are, and any quote that does not say how deep it is going has left out the part that decides whether the patio is still flat in ten years. It also means more spoil leaves site, which is why the muck away is priced by the load rather than folded into a rate.

There is a second consequence worth knowing. Ground that holds water will not take a soakaway, so on these plots we design the falls to a positive outfall, a ditch or a border that can genuinely absorb it, or we build permeable, with an open graded stone reservoir under the paving and permeable jointing above it. BS 7533-13 sets out how that is put together. Deciding which of those applies is a job for a trial hole, not a guess from the doorway.

Everything we do in Lymington Patios, all areas Every area we cover