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A paver patio is close to the lowest maintenance outdoor surface you can build. There is no staining schedule like a wood deck and no resealing requirement like a concrete drive. Left completely alone it will still be there in 30 years. But left completely alone it...

Ordering materials is the part of a patio project where a small arithmetic mistake turns into a second delivery fee and a lost weekend. The math itself is not hard. What trips people up is that the same phrase means two different things, the waste factor changes with...

Nobody admires a base. It gets buried on day two and never seen again, which is exactly why it is where corners get cut and where nearly every failed patio traces back to. There are really only four technical decisions underneath a paver patio: what the base is made...

The patio is the floor. The features are what make people stay out there after dinner. They are also where budgets get away from homeowners, because a fire pit and a seating wall and a pergola can each cost more than the surface they sit on. Worth knowing before you...

Every paver looks good in a showroom. The differences show up four winters later, when one surface still looks new, one has faded a shade, and one has a hairline crack running through three stones near the downspout. A paver is simply a manufactured or quarried unit...

Most people design a paver patio backward. They fall in love with a pattern on a sample board, pick a shape that fits the yard, and then discover the dining table does not clear the grill and the fire pit sits three feet from the fence. The patios that look effortless...

Not every backyard needs 400 square feet of stone. A well built 100 square foot patio that fits a table and two chairs gets used every evening, and it costs a fraction of what the photos in most galleries would run. Small also changes the math in your favor in one...

Most patio galleries are a hundred photos with no captions, which leaves you with a folder of screenshots and no idea what any of them would cost or whether they fit your yard. This one is organized differently. Eighty six ideas, grouped by the way people actually...

You have measured the backyard, saved a few photos, and now you want a number. That is the hard part. Search for pricing and you get a $2,000 range on one site and a $20,000 range on another, with no explanation of why. Both numbers can be right. A paver patio is...