Paver patio, seat wall and fence line in Clayton

The scope

A 2001 house in Clayton with a poured concrete patio that had cracked across the middle and settled towards the house. Every heavy rain sent water at the back door, and the owners had been putting a towel down for two years.

They wanted a patio that drained the right way, somewhere to sit that was not a chair, and the leaning fence along the property line replaced.

The challenge

Johnston County clay is the whole story on this job. It holds water, it swells and shrinks with the seasons, and it does not compact when it is wet.

The original slab had failed because it had been poured on soil that was never properly compacted, with no meaningful base beneath it. Building a paver patio on the same ground with a thin base would have produced the same settlement in half the time, because pavers are less forgiving of movement than a slab is.

The fall was the second problem. The finished patio had to shed water away from the house across its whole width, and the existing grade ran the other way.

What we did

The slab came out, and so did another two hundred millimetres of soil beneath it.

Then the part nobody photographs: a properly compacted aggregate base, built up in layers and compacted between each one, with geotextile separating it from the clay so the base does not migrate into the subgrade over the next decade. Darnell stopped the job for four days at this point because the clay was saturated from a wet week and would not take compaction, and told the owners why rather than pressing on and hoping.

The bluestone pavers were laid on a screeded bedding course with polymeric sand in the joints, set to a consistent fall away from the house. The seat wall is a segmental block wall with a bluestone cap, with its own compacted footing rather than sitting on the patio base.

The fence went in on the same visit: cedar privacy panels on posts set in concrete below frost depth, plumbed individually, with a gate onto the patio. The old fence and the broken slab were removed as part of the site clearance.

More on how we build these is on the patios and pavers page.

The outcome

Two weeks on site including the four day weather stop. Water now runs to the low corner of the garden instead of to the back door, and there is no towel.

A full spring of rain since with no settlement at any joint, which is the base course doing its job.

Finished 14 April 2026.