Expert Tips and Advice on Paving and Cement

Ways Natural Stone Pavers Are Better Than Alternatives for a Patio

Creating a beautiful outdoor patio space increases the living areas around your home and provides a place for you to lounge and relax with guests. Landscape upgrades can also increase a property's value. However, the flooring you select for the patio is crucial to its beauty and longevity. Options include timber decking, poured concrete, concrete pavers and natural stone pavers. The last option, natural stone pavers, is better than the alternatives in several ways, as explained below.

Better Than Timber

Once you create patio flooring, you'll want it to last for decades, which provides good motivation to lay interlocking natural stone pavers. This flooring will outlast the elements and endure through the sun, storms and gales. After all, rock has withstood the elements already for eons. On the other hand, timber can rot and crack, leaving holes in your decking. It can also lead to a termite epidemic, depending on how it's treated. So while natural stone paving will become entrenched within the landscape, timber decking is more transient and will need replacing sooner.

Additionally, natural stone pavers offer more colours than timber, which covers shades of brown, tan, grey and blond. For example, limestone comes in blue, grey, pink and orange, which can blend across the stone to form lovely swirls and patterns. Travertine, another stone possibility, displays fawn, peach, pink and ivory. Natural stone paving evokes an organic feel, but it's more colourful than timber planks.

Preferable to Poured Concrete

A problem with poured concrete is that as the earth underneath settles and shifts, it can compel the concrete above to crack. A continuous concrete slab can't flex and move and go with the flow. Interlocking pavers, though, fit together like a jigsaw, sitting on a base of crushed stone and sand. Because each paver can settle and shift, the paving surface can accommodate earth movement without cracking in response.

Natural stone pavers are also easier to fix if they sustain damage, as you can pull up individual pavers and replace them with new ones. You can't do the same with a continuous concrete slab. If it damages, you may have to undertake extensive areas instead. Additionally, pavers allow you to access the ground underneath if work needs to be done on cabling or wiring. Because you can move the pavers around, you could even remodel the yard in the future and install the pavers in a different spot.

More Beautiful Than Concrete Pavers

Concrete pavers are not as beautiful as organic natural stone. Some concrete pavers try to emulate limestone or travertine pavers, for example. However, concrete doesn't evoke the authentic quality of real rock. The colours within stone have evolved over thousands of years as minerals settle within the earth, which can't be replicated in a few days by manufacturing methods. While imitation is said to be the best form of flattery, it doesn't always work perfectly.

Contact a supplier of natural stone pavers to learn more.