Patios in Winfrith Newburgh

The dig, and what leaves site. An old concrete raft, a run of 1970s pressed flags bedded on nothing much, a raised bed, made ground from a lost outbuilding, or a stump and its roots all come out first. We excavate to firm formation rather than to a fixed depth, because here those are not the same number. The spoil is wet and heavy, so muck away is priced by the load, a grab lorry where one can reach the boundary and a skip where it cannot, and it leaves with us.

The sub base. Over soft ground a geotextile separator goes down first, then MOT Type 1 in layers of about 100mm, each one compacted. A single deep dump of hardcore whacked once on top leaves the bottom half loose, and that loose bottom half is what a rocking patio actually is.

Porcelain, and what it is laid on. Twenty millimetre calibrated porcelain suits this village, because it takes almost no water, so frost has nothing to work on and algae have little to hold. It goes on a full bed of mortar over a slurry primed back, never on dabs. Blobs leave voids, and a void under a dense slab is a crack waiting for somebody to drop a planter.

Stone. Sandstone is warm and forgiving but porous, and it will green on the shaded side. Limestone is quieter in colour and marks with iron. Granite is the hardest of the three and the least likely to move. Travertine we would talk you out of on ground this wet. Hand cut stone varies in thickness so the bed does the levelling; calibrated stone is sawn to one depth and lays faster.

Falls, levels and the damp proof course. Paving runs away from the building, never along the wall, and finishes clear of the DPC. Approved Document C is why we hold two courses of brick between the paving and the damp course wherever the garden allows. Where the garden is higher than the house, that clearance is bought with a step, a retaining edge and a drainage channel at the threshold, not by building up against the wall.

Edges and jointing. Edging is bedded and haunched in concrete, a kerb line or a coping caps a low retaining wall, and a gravel border along the house takes the drip off the eaves. Stone then gets a brush in compound or hand pointing in a matched mortar, worked into a full joint rather than smeared across the face; porcelain wants a grout suited to a dense unit. Half filled joints let water into the bed, and that is where staining and frost damage start.

Repairs. We do small jobs on their own too: a rocking slab re-bedded, a sunken bay taken up and rebuilt, cracked units swapped, tired jointing raked out and replaced.

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.

A patio in a back garden is normally permitted development, but Winfrith Newburgh has its own conservation area and fifty eight listed entries in the parish, so inside that boundary anything visible from the road, a wall taken down to get a machine in, or a tree cut to clear a terrace is a separate planning question. Dorset Council holds the list of what is designated. Paving itself is not building control work.

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. Send a photograph while it is raining if you can, because standing water shows where the falls have gone in a way a dry survey never will. The phone is answered 24 hours for emergencies; scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.

Call now: 07435 839745

The Win runs through the village and the low ground either side of it is mapped in the higher flood zones, which you can check for any address on the government's flood risk service. For a patio that matters in one specific way. A soakaway needs somewhere to put the water, and ground that is already saturated has nowhere to put it.

So on the wet side of the village we do not draw a soakaway and hope. Water comes off the paving on the falls, is collected in an ACO channel at the wall or across a low threshold, and runs to a positive outfall: a ditch, a border that can take it, or an existing gully we have proved still runs. Where the levels will not allow that, a permeable build does the job instead, an open graded stone base and permeable jointing holding the rain and letting it go slowly. BS 7533-13 covers how that is put together.

It changes the dig as well. Ground that lies wet will not hold a formation while you work on it, so we cover the excavation overnight and keep the stone going in as it is dug rather than leaving an open hole to fill with rain.

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