Two contractors can look at the same sunken patch of pavers and hand you two very different bids, and both will call the work base repair. One plans to lift the pavers, add sand under the low spot and put them back. The other plans to take the area down to firm ground and build it back up.
Those are different jobs, and they last very different lengths of time. We have written before about why pavers sink. This post is about the other half of the problem: how to read a base repair bid, what to ask before you sign one, and what the open hole should look like if the work matches the words.
What a bid for real base work says
A bid for base repair should say how deep the excavation goes, or at least that it goes down to firm ground. It should mention geotextile, new aggregate and compaction in lifts. It should name the bedding sand. If all it says is reset pavers or relevel low areas, it is describing a surface job, whatever the heading says.
Ask a few direct questions. Will the old base material come out, or will you add to it? What goes under the new base? How many lifts, and how thick is each one? What caused the settling, and is fixing that cause included? A contractor who has thought it through answers quickly. Vague answers usually mean nobody plans to dig.
Resetting pavers on top of a failed base costs less, and on the day the crew leaves it looks exactly the same as a rebuild. It also tends to come back after a rainy season or two. That difference never shows up on paper unless you ask about it.
Two bids for the same patch
When two numbers for one sunken area sit far apart, line the bids up item by item before you look at the totals. Does each one take out the old base, or only the pavers? Does each say where replacement units come from if some are broken? Does either one mention the downspout or sprinkler that fed the washout, and who moves it? Who hauls away what comes out of the hole? A low bid that leaves out the dig is pricing a different job.
Check the size of the area too. A bid that covers only the visible dip, with no margin of sound pavers taken up around it, puts the edge of the repair right on the edge of the failure, and the damage under a dip almost always spreads wider than the dip. Ask how far past the low spot the work goes and why that line was chosen.
Ask, too, what happens if something unexpected turns up once the pavers are lifted, like a root bigger than anyone guessed or a layer of old rubble under the base. A careful bid says how that gets handled and priced before anyone finds it, so a surprise in the hole leads to a conversation before any extra work starts. If the sunken area runs along the side of the drive, ask about the edge as well. The restraint there is often part of the cause, and a bid that leaves the old one in place is resetting pavers against the thing that let them go.
Sometimes the most useful thing a bid tells you is that the patch is not the problem. When the base under an entire drive was built thin, a paver base repair in one spot only buys time, and a full driveway replacement may be the better spend. A contractor should raise that before the hole is dug.
What the open hole should look like
If you can be home while the area is open, go and look. The sides of the dig should show where the old base stopped and clean, firm ground began, and whatever caused the failure should be visible or already dealt with: the scoured channel, the root, the gray soil mixed through the stone where there was never any fabric. Fabric should lie across the bottom and up the sides before any new stone goes in. The stone should arrive a few inches at a time with the plate compactor run over every layer, and your old pavers should be stacked nearby in the order they came up, so the pattern can go back as it was.
If the cause was a downspout emptying beside the drive or a sprinkler soaking the same joints, it should be turned or moved before the hole closes. A rebuilt base under the same stream of water washes out the same way.
After the crew leaves
A sound repair settles in quietly. Joint sand drops a little over the first few weeks as rain works it down, and a top-up then is normal maintenance. What should not happen is the same dip coming back after the first heavy storms of the season. Watch the spot through one summer. If water still stands there, or the repaired patch sits lower than its edges, call the contractor back while the work is fresh and the cause is easy to trace.
Keep an eye on the ground around it as well. If the first dip was a sign of a base that is thin everywhere, the next soft spot often turns up a few feet away. That usually means the rest of the drive shares the same base, and a good contractor will have mentioned the possibility while the hole was open.
Three things people ask about base work
Q. Will the repaired patch match the rest of the surface? Usually very closely, because we relay the same pavers. The joint sand may look a shade fresher for a while, and any new units replacing broken ones can stand out until they weather. On older surfaces we sometimes borrow a matching unit from an out-of-sight spot and put the new one there, so the visible area stays consistent.
Q. Can you rebuild the base under part of a driveway without redoing all of it? Yes, when the failure is local and the rest of the base is sound. We check the walls of the dig to see whether the problem keeps going. If the same thin or contaminated base runs under the whole drive, patching one area leaves the rest to follow, and we will tell you that before you spend anything.
Q. Does polymeric sand stop pavers from sinking? No. Joint sand keeps the units locked together and slows water at the surface, but it cannot hold up a base that is losing material below. Polymeric sand on a failing base hides the problem for a while, and it makes the eventual repair messier because the hardened sand has to be cleaned out of every joint first.
If you have pavers that keep sinking in the same place, call 786-717-9244 or get pricing on a proper rebuild. We will open it up, show you the cause, and explain the repair before any stone goes back in. Finished repairs and new work are in the gallery, and the Coconut Grove page covers everything else we do in the neighborhood. When the sinking sits on an old patio by the back door and the patio itself has other problems, replacing the patio may make more sense than repairing one corner of it.