Picking the Perfect Patio Pavers

Q: DEAR TIM: I'm planning a paver patio and want to be ready to go when the weather is favorable. I can't afford to hire a contractor. Will brick pavers make a durable patio, or should I lean toward concrete pavers? What's the difference? Patio pavers look great because of the seams and texture, but are they difficult to install? -- Shelly V., Lebanon, N.H.

A: DEAR SHELLY: My wife and I have had paver patios at our last two homes, and I have one at the home I just bought in New Hampshire. Our brick-paver patio in our old home has been in place for more than 20 years and looks as good as the day I installed it. It has been coated with thick ice in the winter and baked in the sun in the summer, and the brick and mortar are wearing like iron.

A concrete paver is not much different from a brick paver. The common concrete pavers that have been used to build walkways, steps and patios are made from smaller stones, coarse sand, Portland cement and colored pigments, which create the earth tones you see. However, over time the colored cement paste wears off the top surface, and the pavers often develop a faded look.

You don't have this color issue when you use brick pavers. The clay that's mined and formed to make the pavers is the same color all the way through. You just have to be careful to buy the correct pavers. Buy them from a real brickyard and make sure they carry the correct weathering rating for your area.

The pavers that resist ice and snow for decades are fired longer and sometimes at hotter temperatures. This heating process actually transforms the soft clay into an artificial stone. If you fire bricks long enough, you can make them so hard and strong they'll resist heavy truck and car traffic when used in roadways. Visit downtown Athens, Ohio, and you can see brick streets that have been in use and exposed to the weather for more than 100 years.

When you install the pavers, you can set them in sand or a sand and Portland cement mix, or you can mortar them directly to a concrete slab. My paver walkways and patios are all mortared to steel-reinforced concrete slabs. This is by far the hardest and most labor-intensive method, but I did so for a reason.

My first experience with pavers was a patio I built for my future mother-in-law. She had instructions to set the uniform pavers in a checkerboard pattern on top of compacted damp sand blended with Portland cement. The sand bed was four inches thick, and it was easy to get it level after compacting it. I did that by dragging a straight 2-by-4 across the sand/cement mixture. The bricks were set directly on the sand, and then fine sand was swept into the cracks between the brick.

Those patio pavers have been down for 37 years, and they look fantastic. Over time a few high and low spots have developed, but they add character to the patio.

A few years after this job, I tried to set thin pavers just on sand. It was a disaster. The brick drifted around on the sand, ants brought the sand to the surface, weeds grew in between the brick, and we constantly tracked sand into the house.

On my next job, to make sure pavers stayed put, had no humps and looked good, I decided to mortar them to a concrete slab. As you can imagine, this requires more excavation depth, expensive concrete, lots of help to place the concrete, and then countless hours of mixing mortar and carefully laying the brick pavers so they are in the same plane and shed water. If you have the desire and the time, it makes for a stunning look. I strongly advise you to experiment, perhaps with a garden-pavers project, so you can see how much work is involved.

Tim Carter can be contacted via his Web site, http://www.askthebuilder.com/printer_Submit_Question.shtml.

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