Paver Installation in
Palm Beach Gardens, FL

We excavate the whole project area first — sod, roots, irrigation heads, the old concrete slab — down to the depth the finished system actually needs: base thickness, plus the sand bed, plus the height of the paver itself. A patio or walkway is roughly 7 to 9 inches of total dig; a driveway goes deeper, because vehicle loads need more base under them. We also set that depth against the garage slab and the street apron, so the finished surface meets both at the right height instead of sitting proud of them. Getting the excavation level and evenly graded here is what makes every layer above it accurate.

On PBG's loose sand we lay woven geotextile fabric across the excavated subgrade before any base material goes down. Without that separation layer, crushed base gradually punches into the sand underneath and the two mix — you lose the bottom of the base, and the paver surface follows it down as dips. It matters most on the mature irrigated lots and anywhere near the NPBCID lake and canal edges, where the ground stays wet. On firmer parcels we confirm at excavation, when we can see the actual soil rather than guess at it.

Crushed limerock base material goes in next — a minimum of 6 inches for a patio or walkway, 8 to 10 inches under a driveway, and deeper on low lake-adjacent lots that hold water. We place it in 2 to 3 inch lifts and compact each lift in two directions with the plate compactor before the next one goes down. Dumping the full depth and compacting once looks identical on the day and leaves soft pockets that telegraph up as dips two summers later. Building a stable base this way is slower, and it is the only version still flat in year twenty.

Over the compacted base we screed a one inch layer of sand — coarse concrete sand, never fine play sand — pulled dead level between screed rails. That bed of sand is what the pavers seat into, so once we level the sand nobody walks on it; a footprint in the bed becomes a low paver in the finished surface. Around drains, pipe penetrations, and pool coping we correct the screeding by hand with a trowel. On a wide motor court, the accuracy of this one layer is exactly what you see in low afternoon light.

We start laying from a fixed square edge and set the pavers in the approved pattern, always working off the surface where the pavers are laid rather than off the sand bed. On ARC projects we verify the pattern and colour run against the approved Design Review submission before anything is locked down — a pattern correction after final compaction is a demolition, not an adjustment. We fit the pavers to the perimeter, the borders and the curves with measured wet cuts. Then the step most failed installations skip: a rigid edge restraint around the perimeter to secure the paver field — spiked plastic edging where paving meets beds and sod, concrete restraint at open driveway edges. Without a hard edge the outer courses creep, the joints open, and the interlock that gives the system its strength is gone.

Polymeric sand is swept across the surface and worked down into every paver joint. We then run the plate compactor over the finished paver surface — with a protective pad on travertine and porcelain, which is most of what we install in this market — so the final compaction seats each unit into the bedding layer and drives the sand fully up into the paver joints. Excess sand is cleared off with a blower before the polymer is activated, the joints are misted to set, and the locked joints are what resist weed growth and the joint sand washout that arrives with the first serious August storm.