How to Lay Paving: The Nine Steps, and What to Check

The driveway that prompted this guide was four years old, about 42 square metres of interlocking pavers on a Wellington smallholding at the foot of the Groenberg slopes. Both wheel tracks had rutted. The whole field had crept about 40mm downhill and the joints had opened enough to lose their sand. Water was running back toward the werf shed instead of away from it. The pavers themselves were perfectly good, so we lifted every one of them, cleaned them, and relaid the same pavers on a new base.

We are called to relay far more paving than we are called to lay new, and in nearly every case it is the same story: the pavers are reusable and the ground underneath them is not. Nobody watched the base go in, because on the two days that actually mattered there was nothing to look at except a man walking a plate compactor over some stone.

Here is the thing about paving that makes it different from every other job in a garden: the part that decides whether it lasts ten years is buried before you ever see it. Once the pavers are down, nobody on earth can tell you what is underneath them without lifting them again. So what follows is the nine steps in the order we work them, the depths we build to, and the point in each step where you get one chance to check something before it disappears for good. This is an article about watching more than it is about doing, because most people reading it will hire the job out. That is the right decision more often than not, and it is exactly why knowing what should be happening down there is worth twenty minutes of your time.

Why paving fails, and why you cannot see it coming

Our paving service page puts it simply: a patio or driveway laid onto soft ground sinks, cracks and spreads within a season. That is the whole argument and we will not re-run it here. What is more useful is reading the failures backwards, because every one of them points at a specific step that got skipped.

Every one of those was decided on a day when there was nothing above ground to look at. And every one of them is a relay rather than a repair, because you cannot fix a base through 1,700 pavers. Our guide to paving cost per square metre covers what that relay costs, which is the strongest argument there is for getting it right the first time.

The single most expensive mistake we see is not a thin base. It is a driveway apron built to the same depth as the patio it joins, because the crack line always lands exactly on that seam.

Lay it yourself, or hire it out

Worth settling honestly and early, so the rest of this article does not have to hedge. The rule we would give a friend: a garden path or a small patio under about 15 square metres, on flat ground, foot traffic only, not up against a house wall, is a genuine two-weekend job and we will happily say so. Anything a vehicle drives on, anything against a building, anything on a slope, and anything over about 25 square metres is not. The reason is not skill.

It is the plant and the volume. A plate compactor hire runs roughly R350 to R600 a day as a rough 2026 guide, and a driveway wants the heavier 100kg class rather than the small one. You need an angle grinder with a diamond blade or a hired block splitter for the cuts. You need a bakkie that carries a cubic metre at a time when the job needs eight of them. And you need somewhere for eleven cubic metres of spoil to go.

Do the arithmetic before you decide. Supply-only pavers run roughly R80 to R250 per square metre and labour only runs roughly R300 to R650 per square metre, both rough 2026 planning figures from our paving cost guide. So the saving is real, but it is smaller than most people assume, and it is concentrated almost entirely in the groundwork, which is precisely the part that fails.

Step 1: Decide what you are paving, and what it has to carry

Short step, biggest consequence. Everything downstream, the paver thickness, the sub-base depth, the excavation depth and the edge restraint, is set by one question: does a vehicle ever drive on it. Not usually. Ever. The delivery bakkie that reverses onto the corner of the patio twice a year is a vehicle.

• ✓Foot traffic: paths, patios, pool surrounds, courtyards.
• ✓Occasional light vehicle: a parking bay used now and then, an apron a car crosses.
• ✓A real driveway: daily cars, a bakkie, and on a smallholding a delivery truck.

The second decision is where the transitions are. Two different build-ups meeting is where paving cracks, so a driveway that runs into a patio needs that junction designed rather than discovered halfway through.

The third is why you are paving at all. If you are paving a strip of lawn that goes bare and recompacts every single year, that is a traffic problem, and a path where people already walk is the honest answer rather than another season of rescuing grass. Our lawn rescue plan covers that call. For shape, position, material and where paving belongs in a garden, our landscaping ideas guide owns the design thinking, and a paving project inside a bigger build should be sequenced with the rest of the work by our landscaping team.

Two local notes. On a new estate stand in Klapmuts the builder's apron is often the only paving on site and often the first thing to fail, because it was built to get a bakkie to the front door during construction, not to last twenty years. And at Val de Vie and similar estates the landscaping code governs paver type and colour, so get that approval before you order 1,900 of anything.

Step 2: Read the ground before anyone digs

Four checks, all cheap, all done before a spade moves, and all of them can change the specification.

1. 1Drainage. Dig a hole about 30cm deep, fill it with water and time how long it takes to drain. Most Winelands gardens drain fast, which is good news for a base. If water sits for hours you have clay, and clay changes the job: a deeper sub-base, and on a driveway a geotextile separation layer between the subgrade and the stone so the stone does not slowly punch down into the clay and vanish. Our water-wise planting guide covers that test in detail.
2. 2Slope. Anything steeper than about 1 in 10 across the paved area stops being a paving question and becomes a levels question, which means a step, a low retaining wall or terracing. That is a different quote, and extra earthworks on a slope are usually priced separately.
3. 3Trees. Note anything whose canopy overhangs the area now, rather than when the excavator hits a 120mm root.
4. 4Services. Irrigation mains and laterals, valve boxes, the pool backwash line, the gate motor cable, the borehole feed. Find them, mark them and cap them before day one, because at 260mm down you will find them the expensive way. Our irrigation team traces and caps lines around excavations as routine.

The thing that most often turns a three-day job into a six-day job is not weather. It is discovering that the ground under the old lawn is 200mm of builders rubble and topsoil, all of which has to come out because nothing compacts on top of it. That is also the one condition where the depths in step 4 are not enough on their own.

Step 3: Set the levels and the fall before anything is dug

The most important step in the article and the one homeowners have never heard of. You do not discover your finished level at the end. You decide it first, in this order: fix the finished paving level against every fixed point it touches, being the door threshold, the damp course, the pool coping, the gate and any existing driveway. Then set the fall. Then work backwards down through the layers to get your excavation depth. Everything after this is subtraction.

Aim for a fall of about 1 in 60, which is roughly 17mm of drop per metre. Never go flatter than 1 in 80, about 12mm per metre, because below that surface tension and a few millimetres of settlement will hold water on the surface. Over a 4 metre patio, 1 in 60 is a drop of about 67mm, which is roughly the height of a paver stood on its edge. That is a great deal more than most people picture, and it is exactly why so much paving ends up laid too flat.

Direction is not negotiable. Always away from every building, never back toward a wall, and finish at least 150mm below the damp course where the paving meets the house.

Two more setting-out decisions that are invisible afterwards and cannot be added later. First, lay two 50mm conduit sleeves across the paved area before anything else goes on, for irrigation and low-voltage lighting. They cost a few hundred rand on the day and a full relay in year three. Our guide to garden irrigation systems covers what to sleeve and where. Second, set the finished paving 15 to 20mm below the finished lawn level, so a mower wheel runs on the paving and that edge never needs trimming again. Worth agreeing with whoever is laying your instant lawn so both trades work to the same level.

One timing note. You cannot compact a saturated sub-base, so base work here is autumn and spring work, as our Western Cape garden calendar sets out. Franschhoek sits higher and wetter with occasional frost, which is a reason to build freer draining rather than a reason to build differently. Our guide to keeping a Paarl garden green has the local rainfall figures behind all of this.

Step 4: Excavate to the right depth

Excavation depth is not a number you look up. It is the sum of three layers plus the paver, measured down from the finished level you fixed in step 3.

• ✓Paver thickness is a specification, not a preference. A 50mm paver is a foot-traffic paver, and putting one under a car gives you cracked pavers as well as a sunken driveway.
• ✓Bedding sand is 50mm on every job, in every row of that table. It never changes, and step 7 explains why that matters.
• ✓Excavate about 150mm wider than the finished paving on every edge, so the edge restraint has ground to sit on.
• ✓Compact the subgrade itself before any stone goes on it. This is the step people skip because it looks like nothing is happening.

Spoil is real volume and real money. Our Wellington driveway at 42 square metres and 260mm deep produced roughly 11 cubic metres of it, which is a lot of bakkie loads, and it is one of the line items that cheap quotes quietly leave out. Our paving calculator sizes the pavers and the bedding sand for you, and our cost guide covers what removal typically adds.

Step 5: Build the sub-base, and compact it properly

The step that decides everything, and the step that looks like nothing. The material is angular crushed stone, G5 quality or a good crusher run, which locks together under compaction. Not river sand. Not builders rubble. Not the spoil you just dug out. And not smooth round stone, which will not interlock no matter how long a plate runs over it.

Then the number almost nobody publishes: never more than about 100mm of loose stone at a time, and compact each layer before the next one goes on. A 150mm driveway sub-base is two layers of about 75mm compacted, not one 150mm dump with a plate run over the top. One dump compacts the top 60mm or so and leaves the rest as loose stone waiting to settle, which it will, in the wheel tracks, in about year three. Three to four passes per layer with the plate, in alternating directions, and lightly damping the stone helps it bind.

The volume arithmetic is worth doing, because it lets you check the delivery. Our 42 square metre driveway at 150mm compacted needs 6.3 cubic metres in place, and crushed stone loses roughly a quarter to a third of its volume as it compacts, so we ordered about 8 cubic metres loose. If four cubic metres arrive for a job that needs eight, the base is half what it should be, and once the pavers are down nobody will ever know.

Maintain the fall in the sub-base as you build it. The bedding sand is not there to correct your levels.

This is the only step where the difference between a good job and a bad one becomes completely invisible within twenty minutes of it happening, which is precisely why it is the step that gets cut.

Step 6: Put the edge restraints in before the pavers, not after

This is what failed on the Wellington driveway, and it is the step most often skipped because it is invisible the moment the beds are backfilled.

Paving is not glued to anything. It is a field of loose units held in place by friction and by its edges. If the edges move, the field spreads, the joints open, the joint sand runs out, and the whole surface unravels from the outside in.

The detail that matters: an edge course of pavers, or a purpose-made edging unit, bedded on concrete and haunched behind with concrete to roughly two thirds of the height of the unit, on the outside where nobody will ever see it. Not troweled on afterwards. Not a line of bricks pushed into sand. On a driveway both long edges get haunched without exception, and so does the entry, because the entry is where wheels turn and turning is what pushes paving sideways.

Where paving meets a wall, a beam or an existing slab, that counts as a restraint already. Where it meets a lawn or a bed, it does not. A crisp steel, stone or brick edge is a design decision as well as a structural one, and our landscaping ideas guide covers the look of it.

Step 7: Screed the bedding sand, then stay off it

The bedding sand is 50mm deep, which works out to roughly 0.05 cubic metres per square metre, so our 42 square metre driveway took about 2.1 cubic metres. Our paving calculator does that sum for your own area.

Three things matter here and the rest is technique. First, this is a bedding layer, not a levelling layer. Fifty millimetres of sand cannot correct a sub-base that is 30mm out, and trying to use it that way is exactly what produces the single rocking paver in an otherwise solid field. Second, it is screeded to an even thickness following the fall you already set, using rails or pipes that are pulled out afterwards and the gaps filled. A correctly screeded bed looks like a flat, unmarked, slightly rough sheet with no footprints in it. Third, and this is the one to remember: once it is screeded, nobody walks on it. The laying works forward off the pavers already laid, never off the sand.

Use sharp or river sand rather than fine building sand, and never plaster sand. Do not screed more than can be laid that day, because a screeded bed left overnight in wind or a shower is a bed to be done again. Quantities and paver counts belong to our size chart guide.

Step 8: Lay the pavers, and cut last

Pattern is a structural decision, not only a visual one. Herringbone at 45 or 90 degrees is the only pattern with real interlock, because no joint runs continuously in the direction of travel. That is why it is the driveway pattern, and why anything else on a driveway will eventually creep.

• ✓Herringbone: driveways and anything a vehicle crosses. Most cutting, most interlock.
• ✓Stretcher or running bond: patios and paths. Easiest to lay, perfectly adequate for foot traffic.
• ✓Stack bond: contemporary look, least interlock of all. Keep it off driveways.
• ✓Basketweave: suits a small formal courtyard.

The pattern feeds straight back into what you order. Herringbone means diagonal cuts along all four edges, which is exactly why the wastage allowance goes to 10 percent or more for it, rather than the 5 percent that covers a simple rectangular running bond. Our size chart guide and the paving calculator both cover that.

Joints are 2 to 3mm, which is a butted joint with the spacer nibs touching, not a mortar joint. Work forward off the laid paving and run string lines every few courses, because a herringbone field will drift and you cannot see it drifting until it is 20mm out over ten metres. Draw from three or four packs at once so any batch variation blends across the field instead of landing as a stripe.

Cut last, and do all the cuts in one session. Diamond blade or a block splitter, and never cut a piece smaller than about a third of a paver, because it will not hold. Cutting is the noisy, dusty, slow part, and it is roughly where a do-it-yourself job stalls on the second weekend.

Step 9: Joint it, vibrate it in, and do it again

The finishing step that gets treated as tidying up, and is actually structural. The joint sand is what transfers load from one paver to the next. It is what turns 1,700 loose units into one surface.

1. 1Brush dry fine or kiln-dried sand across the whole field until every joint is full, then sweep the surface clean.
2. 2Run the plate compactor over the paving itself, with a rubber mat or an old piece of carpet on the base plate so it does not chip the faces. The vibration drops sand down into the joints and beds the pavers into the sand below.
3. 3Top up the joints, which will have dropped noticeably, and vibrate again. Two passes minimum, three on a driveway.

Then the piece of advice worth the whole section: put a reminder in your phone. After the first proper winter rain, walk the paving and brush more sand into the joints. The first rains settle and wash the joints more than anything else ever will, and paving that gets one top-up in its first winter behaves differently for the rest of its life to paving that never gets one.

Sealing is optional and mostly cosmetic, and it darkens the colour permanently, so try it on a spare paver first and never seal in the first few weeks. Two things never to do, both of which we get called out to fix: do not point the joints in mortar on a flexible base, because the base moves, the mortar cracks, and you end up with a rigid surface on a flexible bed, which is the worst of both. And do not pressure wash the joints, because you are washing out the structure.

The six checks you get one chance at

None of these need any skill or any equipment beyond a tape measure and a spirit level. All six take under two minutes. And the reason a good contractor does not mind you making them is that a good contractor is building exactly what they quoted.

1. 1Excavation depth, on day one or two. Tape from the string line to the bottom of the trench, checked against the table in step 4.
2. 2What came off the truck. Angular crushed stone, not sand, not rubble, not smooth river stone, and roughly the right volume for the area.
3. 3Compaction. The heel test on the finished sub-base, plus the question of whether it went in as two layers or one dump.
4. 4The fall. A spirit level with a 17mm packer under one end, checked before the bedding sand goes on, and checked in the right direction, away from every wall.
5. 5Concrete behind the edge course, looked at before any bedding sand is laid.
6. 6The plate compactor coming back out after the pavers are down, and the joints topped up and vibrated a second time.

How to read a paving quote

Every step above translates into a line on a quote. If a line is not on the quote, it is not in the price. An itemised paving quote should name:

• ✓Excavation depth, and spoil removal as its own line.
• ✓Sub-base material and its compacted thickness, in millimetres.
• ✓How compaction is described. A number of layers is a specification. The word levelled is not.
• ✓Bedding sand.
• ✓The pavers by exact size, thickness and colour, with the quantity and the wastage allowance.
• ✓The laying pattern.
• ✓Edge restraint construction, with the words concrete haunch in it.
• ✓Jointing sand, and the falls.

Three quotes are only comparable if all three state a sub-base depth. If one comes in R120 per square metre under the others, the difference is almost always in the ground rather than in the pavers, because the pavers cost roughly the same from roughly the same yards. Our cost guide covers installed rates by paver type, supply only against laid, and what is normally quoted separately. Quantities belong to the paving calculator and the size chart, and where paving sits in a wider garden budget is in our landscaping ideas guide.

If we were hiring a contractor ourselves, we would ask exactly two questions: how deep is the sub-base and what stone is it, and how is the edge restrained. The answers tell you more than the total does. A quote that is vague about the base is not necessarily dishonest, it is often just how quotes have always been written in this trade. But you are entitled to ask for the numbers in writing, and a contractor who will not put a depth on paper is telling you something.

Paving near a tree

Roots are the commonest reason we redesign a path on site. The working rule is to stay outside the drip line of anything you intend to keep, and where you cannot, hand dig inside it rather than machine dig. Do not cut a structural root, which on a mature tree means anything over about 50mm. Use a flexible restraint rather than a rigid concrete haunch on that one edge, so the paving can move a little with the tree instead of cracking.

A permeable build-up is worth the extra cost specifically here, because roots still need water and air, and a sealed surface over a root plate slowly starves the tree that the paving was built around.

The handoff runs both ways. If a tree is already lifting existing paving, that is a tree decision before it is a paving decision, and a crown thin is usually the right call over a fell for a mature oak, as our tree felling and pruning service and our cost guide both set out. And if a tree has come out, grind the stump before you pave, rather than paving over a stump that will rot and leave a hollow in three years. We would rather redesign a path than cut a 100mm oak root, and we have talked clients out of both a fell and a straight line more than once.

A Wellington driveway, lifted and relaid

Back to the job at the top. A 42 square metre driveway and turning apron on a working Wellington smallholding, on sloping ground, with a bakkie and a monthly feed delivery truck using the apron and a mature pepper tree overhanging the gate. It had been laid four years earlier by a general builder during a house extension, at the same build-up as the patio it joins.

What we found on lifting it: about 60mm of unwashed river sand and rubble where the sub-base should have been. No concrete behind any of the three free edges. And an apron falling roughly 1 in 80 back toward the werf shed.

What we did. Excavated to about 260mm below finished level, which is a 60mm paver, 50mm of bedding sand and 150mm of compacted sub-base, and took roughly 11 cubic metres of spoil off the site. Laid the sub-base in two layers of about 75mm rather than one dump, ordering about 8 cubic metres loose to finish at 6.3 in place. Reset the fall to about 1 in 60, which is roughly 17mm per metre, running away from every building and finishing 150mm clear of the shed damp course. Haunched both long edges and the gate entry in concrete. Laid two 50mm conduit sleeves across the apron before the bedding sand went down, for the irrigation lateral and the gate lighting.

The same 220 by 110mm pavers went back down at 41 per square metre, so 1,722 in the field, in herringbone at 45 degrees for the interlock. Worth noting that the original order should have carried 10 percent for the diagonal cutting rather than 5 percent, which is about 1,900 pavers. Inside the drip line of the pepper tree we hand dug, cut no root over about 50mm, and used a flexible restraint on that edge instead of a haunch. Joint sand went in, was vibrated, topped up, vibrated again, and re-brushed after the first winter rain about six weeks later.

Nine working days spread over two and a half weeks, with three days lost to rain, because base work does not happen on saturated ground. As a rough 2026 planning guide a typical interlocking driveway runs around R400 to R700 per square metre installed, so 42 square metres is somewhere around R16,800 to R29,400. Our cost guide breaks that down properly and the calculator covers quantities.

Two lessons. The pavers were never the problem, and we relaid the very same ones. And the owner paid for that driveway twice, four years apart, for want of six checks that would have taken about twelve minutes in total on the first build.

The first year, and what maintenance actually is

New paving settles a little in its first months, and that is normal rather than a defect. Worth saying, because it is a common and unnecessary panic.

The one job that genuinely matters is the joint sand top-up after the first proper winter rain. After that it is ordinary. Sweep it, because leaf litter breaking down in the joints is what feeds moss and weeds. Weeds and ants in the joints are a symptom of joints that are not full, so refill them rather than spraying. Moss on a shaded south side is a light and damp problem rather than a dirt problem, so it will keep coming back until something about the light changes.

Do not pressure wash, or if you must, keep the lance moving and angled, stay off the joints, and re-sand afterwards. Oil on a driveway lifts best when it is fresh. Keep your spare pavers dry, out of the sun, and from the same delivery, because a replacement from a new batch will always show, as our paving calculator page explains.

The lawn edge detail from step 3 pays off here: paving set 15 to 20mm below the finished lawn means the mower runs over the edge and nobody ever trims it, which matters most where new instant lawn meets new paving. If you would rather the sweeping and the joint top-ups happened on a schedule, that is part of what our garden maintenance rounds cover.

Where we tell people not to pave

Four situations where we will say so.

• ✓The narrow shaded side passage or small courtyard, where the real question is not which paver but whether this should be a hard surface at all. Gravel, or artificial grass on a properly built base, is often better, cheaper and warmer to look at. We install both, so we have no reason to push you either way, and our artificial grass guide covers what it costs and how long it lasts.
• ✓Over the root plate of a tree you intend to keep, as covered above.
• ✓The whole garden. Every square metre you pave is a square metre of rain that has to go somewhere, and on a small stand paving everything simply moves the water problem to the boundary and then to your neighbour. The Cape gets its rain in concentrated winter months, so this is a real constraint here rather than a theoretical one. Permeable build-ups, gravel and planted beds are how you keep water on the property, and our Paarl water-wise guide covers the rest of that thinking.
• ✓Anything on a slope steep enough to want terracing. The honest answer there is that you have a retaining wall project with some paving in it, and the wall has to be priced and built first. Our landscaping ideas guide covers terracing and low retaining walls, and our landscaping team sequences the whole build.

The nine steps above are really one idea. Everything that decides whether paving lasts happens below the level you will eventually be standing on, in a window of a few days, and you now know exactly when that window is open and what to look at while it is. If you take nothing else from this, take the depth table in step 4 and the six checks.

We lay patios, paths and driveways across Paarl, Stellenbosch, Wellington and the Winelands, and we will put the sub-base depth and the edge detail in writing on the quote, because we build to them anyway. We are equally happy to tell you that the job you are planning does not need paving at all. Send us your measurements for a quote, or see our paving and hard landscaping service.