Sandstone Paving Sutherland Shire

Paving for the Sutherland Shire Properties

There is a pattern to paving jobs in the Sutherland Shire, where the housing is largely a wide spread from post-war brick to substantial waterfront rebuilds. A whole street tends to reach the same point at the same time.

Every paving quote we write for the Sutherland Shire starts on site, with photographs, levels and a walk of the full run. You cannot allow for sandstone shelves that turn a routine hole into a rock-drilling job from a satellite image.

Sutherland Shire is not a uniform place to work. Between sandstone ridges and gullies falling to the Georges and Hacking waterways and sandy soils over Hawkesbury sandstone with clay pockets inland, two properties in the same street can need quite different approaches to the same job.

Call 0492 879 796 for a free measure in the Sutherland Shire and we will walk the job with you before anything is priced.

What Usually Brings People To Us

Ask three contractors for paving in the Sutherland Shire and you may get three different answers. The difference usually comes down to whether anyone has looked at steep waterfront blocks reached only by stairs or a barrow run before pricing the job.

• Water pooling in the middle of a paved area with no fall
• Pavers spreading at the edges because there was no restraint
• A surface that has become slippery with algae in a shaded aspect
• Settlement over a service trench that was never compacted properly

Technical Notes on Paving

Where materials have to cope with sandy ground that drains beautifully but offers little lateral resistance, we upgrade the fixings rather than the visible finish. Fixings are almost always what fails first in this part of southern Sydney.

The parts you cannot see once the job is finished are the parts worth paying for: footings, drainage, fixings and substructure. That is as true in the Sutherland Shire as anywhere.

• A driveway base is deeper than a patio base because it carries wheel loads that concentrate at the tyre contact patch.
• Paving fails from the base up, not from the surface down, so base depth and compaction decide how long it lasts.
• Bedding sand is a levelling layer, not a structural one, and too much of it is a common cause of rutting.
• Edge restraint holds the whole field in compression; without it the outer courses spread and the pattern opens up.
• Efflorescence on new paving is salt migrating out of the base and usually clears with weathering.

Local Conditions That Change the Job

One thing specific to this part of southern Sydney is salt-laden air off Bate Bay and Port Hacking that punishes untreated steel. It is easy to miss on a first look and expensive to discover once work has started.

Nothing about the Sutherland Shire is standard once you get past the front gate. We measure the whole site rather than the section you called about, because bushfire-prone land along the Royal National Park interface has a habit of turning up mid-job otherwise.

Tree cover and root zones matter around the Sutherland Shire. Roots are worked around rather than cut through, both because the tree matters and because a cut root under a footing is a future problem.

The Paving Formats We Build

What Needs Approval in the Sutherland Shire

Where a job needs approval we say so at quote stage rather than after the deposit. It is one of the few parts of a the Sutherland Shire project that cannot be fixed later.

We can tell you what usually applies around the Sutherland Shire, and we will always recommend confirming the current position with Sutherland Shire Council before you commit. Controls change, and a wrong assumption is expensive to unwind.