Brick Paver Installation in
Wellington, FL

We dig out the full project area first: sod, roots, old concrete, and any unsuitable soil, down to the depth the finished system needs — base thickness, plus the sand bed, plus the paver height. A patio or walkway is roughly 7 to 9 inches of total dig. A house driveway goes deeper. An equestrian drive where trailers turn goes deeper again, because we are not designing for the weight sitting still, we are designing for it pivoting. Wellington also protects its trees and enforces its own landscape and appearance standards, so we identify protected trees and their root zones before excavation starts — not with a machine already parked on the drive.

We probe for organic muck at the site visit and again at the dig, because depth varies lot to lot and sometimes corner to corner. Where organic material is present it comes out — it will never carry a load, no matter what goes on top of it. Compacted fill replaces it, with geogrid reinforcement where the excavation is deep or the span is wide, and woven geotextile separating the crushed base from everything below so the two never mix. Skip this and the base slowly disappears into the muck, taking the paver surface with it in three to five years.

Crushed limerock base material goes in — a minimum of 6 inches under a patio or walkway, 8 to 10 inches under a residential driveway, and more where trailers and delivery trucks turn. We place it in 2 to 3 inch lifts and compact every one of them in both directions, plate compactor over the whole surface before the next lift arrives, with extra passes concentrated at the turning radius and the gate approach. Dumping the full depth and compacting once leaves soft pockets you cannot see on handover day and cannot miss two seasons later. A proper base is the whole product; the paving stones are only the finish on it.

Over the stable base we screed a one inch layer of sand — coarse concrete sand, not fine play sand — pulled dead level between screed rails. The pavers seat into that bed of sand, so once we level the sand nobody walks across it; every footprint in the sand bed becomes a low paver in the finished surface. Around wash-rack drains, hose bibs, and pipe penetrations we finish the screeding by hand with a trowel and hold the falls we designed, because drainage that is a quarter inch out over a wash apron is drainage that does not work.

We start laying from a fixed square edge and work off the laid surface, never off the sand bed, and we fit the pavers into borders, curves and the perimeter with wet cuts measured off the run. Then the detail that decides whether an equestrian drive lasts: the edge restraint. A trailer tire scrubbing sideways through a slow turn puts enormous lateral load on the outer course — garden-grade plastic edging is fine where a walkway meets sod, and it will not hold a turning gooseneck. At trailer turnarounds, gate pads, and truck approaches we use a concrete haunch restraint around the perimeter to secure the paver courses against tires scrubbing sideways. Lose the hard edge and the outside courses creep outward, the joints open, and the interlock that carries the load is finished.

Once the pavers are laid, polymeric sand is swept in and worked down into every paver joint, then we run the plate compactor across the finished surface — with a protective pad on travertine and porcelain — so the final compaction seats each unit and drives sand up into the paver joints. Excess sand comes off with a blower before the polymer is activated, and the joints are misted to set. This matters more on a horse property than anywhere else: around wash racks and hose bibs the surface gets rinsed daily, and ordinary loose sand is out of the joints inside a season, followed immediately by weed growth and loose, rocking pavers.