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Concrete Patio With Paver Border

Which Is Easier To Install Pavers Or Stamped Concrete

How to Install Concrete Pavers | Ask This Old House

Both stamped concrete and precast concrete pavers need to be installed over a well-compacted, properly graded subgrade, so the work and time required to prepare the foundation is similar. However, placement times tend to be longer for concrete pavers because of the labor involved to place each unit individually . The advantage of concrete pavers is that they can be opened to foot or vehicle traffic immediately after placement. Poured-in-place concrete typically needs to cure for at least 24 hours before its ready for foot traffic and seven days for vehicle traffic .

How to choose: Ask your concrete contractor to give you an estimate of the overall placement time, from start to finish. If its important for you to be able to walk or drive on your new pavement as soon as possible, concrete pavers will often be a better choice.

Concrete Patio Ideas: Extend Your Patio With Pavers

Many newer homes are sold with an open concrete patio out back, usually only big enough for a small grill, a couple of chairs, and a plant or two. Homeowners who are serious about using their outdoor living area find a typical slab patio is just too small for entertaining or any real kind of enjoyment.

The solution: extend the concrete patio. Pouring additional concrete can get expensive. Permits are required in many areas to pour concrete, and that usually involves hiring a contractor, driving the cost of this project into the thousands. An alternative to pouring more concrete is extending the concrete patio with pavers.


Patio pavers offer homeowners many benefits.

  • They are easy to install, so homeowners can make the extension of a concrete patio a weekend do-it-yourself project.
  • Pavers come in a large variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and materials, giving homeowners flexibility in creating additional outdoor living space.
  • Pavers can be used to create large or small spaces as well as making that space as formal or informal as the homeowner wishes.
  • They are also easy and inexpensive to repair.

Below, I describe the 11 steps you need to take to extend your patio with concrete pavers.

Which One Is The Best

Its hard to settle on an overall best covering for your concrete patio. The best cover will vary from one concrete patio to another. Other factors such as budget, DIY skill-level, and unique environmental challenges all play a role in determining which option to go with.

Covering your concrete patio with a carpet is logically the easiest, but even the most beautiful carpet can be a poor fit for the overall aesthetic appeal of certain properties. Pavers and flagstone are the most durable, but they can be more challenging to pull off for the average DIY enthusiasts.

So, evaluate your skills, budget, and peculiar needs to choose the best cover for your concrete patio.


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Mixing Concrete Paver Sizes Gives You The Best Of Both Worlds

The great thing about concrete pavers is they come in many different sizes, which means you can really get creative with your space. We love seeing our large format concrete patio pavers mixed in a pattern with regular-sized pavers:

We also love the way regular-sized Rice White rectangular concrete pavers and edging are used throughout the luxurious outdoor living space pictured below. The hardscape designer added a little something extra to the side yard by installing large format rectangular pavers punctuated by lush green grass:

Another great example of this concrete patio design trend is this hardscape that pairs large square concrete pavers with smaller red brick pavers as edging in a diagonal stacked bond pattern:

Prepare Your Patio & Fill Dents With Cement

Patio edging, Concrete patio designs, Concrete patio

Before you start laying the carpet, you need to ready the concrete surface. It should be flat, clean, and dry. If there are any dents on the surface, you can level it up using a floor patch.


For deep gouges, filling with cement is a better idea. With the surface adequately fixed, youll have a cleaner installation when you finish.

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Measure The Length & Width Of The Area

Before installing the carpet on your patio, you need to determine exactly how much carpet you need for the project. You can discover this with your tape measure. For a simple square or rectangle patio, the job should be easy enough. You only need to get the width and the length of the space.

For oddly shaped spaces, youll need to be a bit more elaborate with your measurements. Draw a diagram with dimensions, and you can get a recommendation on how much carpet you need when you get to the store.

Idea #: Use The Same Material As Your Raised Patio Surface

If your raised patio is made out of a material like pavers or brick, you could use that same material to create a special edge design! The material can be stacked or stood up on end to create your own design.


Because our raised patio surface was a stamped concrete, we decided to incorporate the look of an edge into the pattern by accounting for that when running the lines. We simply chose to do a 4-inch edge and ran the lines along at that measurement, giving us a lovely finished look to our raised concrete patio edge!

To see more how we built our raised patios , check out this post! You can also take the full tour right here.

Our complete list of every single home project is viewable HERE.

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Using Paver Edging In Construction

Paver edging is always installed as part of a larger project, building a sand-set paver patio or laying a brick walkway. After the patio is laid out and a gravel base is installed, leveled, and compacted, the lengths of paver edging are installed over the gravel base to form a boundary for the paver sand that will be spread out and leveled before brick or stone pavers are laid.


Occasionally, contractors or DIYers choose to install the edging after the patio pavers are laid, tucking the edging under the bricks before anchoring it to the ground. Although this is not technically “correct,” it makes for a somewhat more forgiving building process, since anchoring the paver edging first before requires a great deal of layout precision if you want to avoid cutting bricks at the edges.

How Do The Decorative Options Differ

How to Design and Install a Paver Walkway

Concrete pavers are great for recreating the look of natural stone or brick. They come in a wide array of colors, stone-like shapes, and sizes, and you can mix and match paver patterns and colors to create striking borders and color contrasts .

You can combine two or more paver colors for added variation. Concrete Designs LLC in Holiday, FL

Stamped concrete also allows you to create pavements that resemble natural stone or brick, but unlike pavers, random stone and wood patterns are possible as well . Stamped concrete also gives you the ability to impart seamless stone-like textures without pattern or grout lines through the use of texture skins. Another advantage of stamped concrete is the ability to customize the color. Through the use of concrete stains or dry-shake color hardeners, stamped concrete can be made to look identical to real stone and antiqued to create realistic weathering effects.

How to choose: Both stamped concrete and concrete pavers give you endless design flexibility. The choice often depends on the look you want to achieve. If customization of color is a priority, stamped concrete will better suit your needs.


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What About Repairs Or Replacement

In comparison to poured-in-place concrete, precast concrete pavers offer the advantage of easy, seamless replacement if repairs are needed. Any damaged, cracked, or sunken pavers can simply be replaced or reset with no noticeable patchwork.

Repairing and replacing stamped concrete is often more difficult and costly. Poured concrete slabs may crack due to encroaching tree roots, freeze/thaw cycles, and other disturbances that shift the subbase beneath the slab. When a concrete slab cracks, theres not much you can do to repair it seamlessly. However, if the concrete is structurally sound, there are ways to repair minor defects without tearing it out and replacing it completely.

How to choose: Whether you install concrete pavers or poured-in-place concrete, the need for repair or replacement is rare if the pavement has been installed properly over a well-compacted subgrade. However, if a concrete slab sustains major damage, chances are the entire slab will need to be removed and replaced, which can be very costly.

Paver Border Design Options

There are numerous options for paver patterns and border designs. Alternatives include everything from a simple lay with no border to intricate contrasting borders or raised edgers. An emerging trend is to entangle the paver field with the surrounding landscape in what is known as biophilic outdoor design.


  • Irregular shapes entangled with the landscape.
  • Porcelain plank pavers entangled using a geometric design.
  • Classic design with no border.
  • Modular pavers with contrasting border.
  • Double border that includes a raised edger.

Read Also: How To Diy Concrete Patio

Glue The Border Pavers Over The Concrete

Set each paver down and run some construction adhesive on the side of it. This will ensure the sand cant wash away from between pavers once youve set them down. As the concrete is drying, use a chalk line and a tape measure to outline the borders location carefully.

With the chalk line as your guide, glue the border pavers down along the house and across the patios two sides. If you end up with some squished-up adhesive between pavers, dont wipe it off. Allow it to harden, and then trim it off the patio blocks using a utility knife.

How Do I Keep My Pavers From Moving

sidewalk finishes
  • Choosing the edging type. Depending on the shape of your patio, you will have to pick between using rigid or flexible edging options. Straight edges typically require the rigid option, while round patio shapes need flexible edging.
  • Securing the edging with spikes. Most edging options have metal spikes that you need to drive through holes along the edging. The spikes should be placed each 8 to 10 inches for the best results.
  • Locking the pavers in place. The spikes should be completely buried into the ground in order for the pavers to be successfully secured.
  • Covering the edges. The primary purpose of paver edging is to be functional. Once the installation is complete, you shouldnt be able to see it. This is done by covering the pavers with mulch or loamy soil.

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Covering A Concrete Patio With Carpets

Using an outdoor carpet to cover your concrete patio is another excellent way to bring the space to life. It also holds a wide range of benefits.

Apart from the fact that its an easy way of making the patio more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, its also a material you can count on to hold up nicely against environmental factors, as well as keeping your concrete patio cooler a hot summer day.

Installing the carpet as a DIY project is simple. If you have some time on your hands, you can save a decent amount of money.

Tips For Designing With Large Concrete Pavers

One of the great things about concrete pavers is that they allow you to achieve the aesthetic natural stone look youve been dreaming about without breaking the bank. This couldnt be more true than with the recent design trend of using large concrete pavers in interior and exterior design. Large slabs of natural stone and natural paving stones can be pricey, but with architectural-grade concrete, you can get the perfectly imperfect beauty of natural stone pavers without paying an arm and a leg.

Are you looking for large concrete pavers for your next hardscaping or interior design project? Peacock Pavers offers a variety of paver sizes, including larger sizes measuring up to 3 feet. We love working with clients to achieve their vision, so here are six tips wed like to share for designing with large concrete pavers:

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Where To Find Large Concrete Pavers

Ready to bring the bold look of large concrete pavers to your patio, garden, outdoor kitchen, pool deck, or interior space? Peacock Pavers are low-maintenance, cost-effective, and come in a wide variety of colors, shapes, and sizes to suit your interior design or landscape design needs. Learn more about using our large format concrete pavers in your next decor project by requesting a quote, ordering a sample kit, or calling us today at 800.264.2072.

Figure B: Border Layout

How to Lay Patio Pavers

A Snap a chalk line parallel to the house to mark the location of the border decorative pavers. Remember to leave a gap of at least 1/4 in. between the border decorative pavers and the house.

B Lay out field pavers to locate the side borders. A simple row of pavers will work even if you plan to lay them later in a herringbone pattern as we did. The goal is to establish a field width that allows each course to end with a full or half paver, but not smaller pieces. That means less cutting, less waste and a neater look.

C Position the border pavers and mark their locations. It’s OK if the border decorative pavers don’t quite reach the edge of the patio, but don’t let them overhang. Nudge one border patio block outward by 1/4 in. to allow a little extra space for the field pavers.

D Snap a chalk line to mark one side border. To make this line square with the line along the house, use the 3-4-5 method.E Mark the other side border. Measure from the first side to make sure the two sides are parallel.

F Leave the final border unmarked and install the border after the field is complete. That open end makes screeding off the excess sand easier and lets you position the final border perfectly.

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Lay Patio Paving Stones Or Slabs Over The Bedding Layer

At this point, its time to lay your field with pavers. Youll want to start in a corner and work your way around the border toward the middle.

Be sure to use the so you dont bulldoze your thin layer of sand. This will result in an uneven surface.

Youll likely need to make a few cuts along any structures or posts. Refer to our tutorial 6 Ways to Cut Paving Stones to ensure you follow safe methods.

Glue Down The Border Pavers Over Concrete

After setting each paver, run a bead of construction adhesive up the side of it. That will keep the sand from washing out between pavers. How to lay paving stones

To get started, scrub the border area with a concrete cleaner or muriatic acid mixed with water . Any stiff brush will do, but a deck stripping brush on a broom handle makes it easier. Hose down the patio when you’re done scrubbing the border.

While the concrete is drying, grab a tape measure and a chalk line and carefully plan the locations of the borders . Using the chalk lines as a guide, glue down the border pavers along the house and two sides of the patio . We used polyurethane construction adhesive for a strong, long-lasting bond . If adhesive squishes up between pavers, don’t try to wipe it off. Just let it harden, then trim it off of the concrete patio blocks with a utility knife.

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Fill In Cracks With Mortar Or Gravel

You can fill the spaces and cracks between stones with either mortar or gravel, depending on the look youre targeting. If you choose to fill gaps with mortar, be sure to apply it liberally. You can use a float to remove any extra.

Wait for the mortar to dry for 10 to 15 minutes, then wipe the flagstones with a rag dipped in water. The gray film caused by mortar can take a while to disappear, so you may need to wipe with the rag a few times.

Considering The Cons: Snap

Stamped Concrete Patio with Smooth Border, Ashlar Slate Pattern ...

Snap-Edge requires some additional tools, a hand saw or some type of cutters to snip the material in order to bend it to shape. It also typically costs more than concrete per linear foot.

Concrete edging requires a wheel barrel, shovel, water and bags of concrete mix. Concrete must be mixed on site, given time to cure once installed, and any excess concrete must be properly disposed of. Concrete also requires a more labor-intensive process to install and is more labor-intensive to remove if that ever needs to happen.

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Think Outside The Box

You can build an amazing-looking and long-lasting patio even if you dont have any experience with this sort of project. Follow these steps and you should be able to pull it off without any complications: mark out the outside dimensions of the project area and then dig out the area to a depth of 4 to 7 inches.

Install edge restraints, add a layer of gravel, compact it, then a layer of patio paver sand, and level it.

We found this YouTube tutorial to be helpful.

How To Install Patio Pavers Over An Existing Concrete Slab

When you want to learn how to overlay concrete with paving stones, youve come to the right place. This article will show you step-by-step how to dress up an old, cracked, or unwanted concrete patio by covering it with nice, eye-appealing pavers.

When you want to learn how to overlay concrete with paving stones, youve come to the right place. This article will show you step-by-step how to dress up an old, cracked, or unwanted concrete patio by covering it with nice, eye-appealing pavers.

Youll want to consider a couple of things when doing a paver overlay on concrete.

  • Make sure you have the proper ground clearance for your pavers around your siding or any pillars.
  • If any steps are involved, consider whether or not you want to overlay them as well.
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