Beautifying Your Home with Pavers

The addition of a patio, walkway, driveway, or other landscaping feature using pavers is an excellent way to increase the beauty and value of your home.  Pavers are concrete, brick, or stone blocks that come in a very wide variety of shapes and styles.  Pavers are a great choice for building all types of durable, attractive, outdoor flat surfaces from patios to driveways.

Natural stone pavers such as granite, marble, and travertine create a beautiful rustic look.  These pavers are cut from quarries in various shapes and sizes, and the color depends on where they originated.  Natural stone is unique because no two stones are exactly alike.  Even stones from the same quarry can have widely varying aesthetics.

Brick pavers are made from a mixture of clay, sand, and cement.  They are hardened by firing them in a kiln.  Most brick pavers are orange, red, and tan.  They can be nearly uniform in color, or for a more varied, rustic look they can have different colors depending on the clay and how they were fired.

Concrete pavers are manufactured using colored cement.  Concrete pavers are usually very uniform in color and shape, although shapes and colors can be mixed to create some very attractive designs.  Concrete pavers are often made with a lip that interlocks with adjacent pavers to add strength and limit shifting.

Installation of pavers is not difficult, but it does involve  a lot of work including digging, shoveling, and heavy lifting.  The ground has to be leveled and compacted, then the pavers are laid, usually on a bed of sand.  Installation practices vary based on the nature of the soil.  In many cases, the best results will be achieved by hiring an experienced contractor to install the pavers.