Paver Repair & Re-Sanding in Bloomfield Township

The Concrete Masonry and Hardscapes Association (CMHA) calls for an edge restraint around a paver surface and wherever it meets another material, and it describes how a failed one shows: joints widen along the border, perimeter pavers tip or settle, and sand escapes, most visibly within two feet of the edge. A house wall can serve as a restraint. A planting bed or the lawn cannot, so where a patio ends at a bed, every foot of that border depends on what was installed there.

CMHA rules out the flat landscape edging used around flower beds, because it cannot keep pavers tight enough to hold their interlock, and it does not recommend timber, which warps and eventually rots. Soil backfill is never a restraint. For a home patio on a gravel base, the choices CMHA lists are plastic or aluminum edging made for pavers, precast concrete or cut stone, and poured concrete curbs. Spiked restraints are fixed into the compacted base, never into soil, and the base should extend past the restraint at least as far as it is thick, which CMHA says steadies the restraint in soils that heave.

Frost is the other force at work on these lots. Heave takes three things at once: temperatures below freezing, a soil that pulls water up toward the frost (silts and loams do it most), and a supply of water, and the damage comes where the ground rises unevenly. In spring the thaw works down from the surface and traps meltwater above soil that is still frozen, which softens the ground, and a refreeze adds to the heave. Water is the one an owner can sometimes redirect, so the walkaround notes where downspouts and grade send it, whether the patio sits high on the lot or low near the Wing Lake shoreline, Square Lake or Gilbert Lake.