I called on Tim Stockman of Stockmanlandscaping as I had a garden full of building rubble plus cracked concrete path and patio which all needed clearing then a new patio and path built. Tim was a friendly and excellent workman doing first all the heavy shifting and breaking up work, I than rebuilt some necessary drains, before Tim laid the 45 square meters of patio plus 20 meters of brick edged stone and gravel curving path.
The job took much longer than estimated, this was the very wet summer of 2012, and some days or even weeks it was simply too wet to lay cement for bedding the stone. Weather does play a part in this type of work if good workmanship is expected.
The patio has now been down over the winter and the Indian natural grey sandstone paving, from Castacrete Ltd, has stood up to this winters freezing days without problem. I had given Tim ideas on how I wanted falls to go for draining but my having chosen a mix of stone sizes up to 900 x 600 it wasn't possible to lay it all with my intricacies on drainage falls so some water drains slightly off course. Just something anyone else building a patio needs to consider.
I had my ideas on design, Tim had useful suggestions on modifications and was easy to work with over design while doing technically good work on the all important foundations and stone setting. Initially he was also going to build a small area of wooden deck, but here my construction design and requirements didn't match his methods so he happily left me to happily build the wooden deck (I'm a woodwork sort of guy) and instead did more landscaping of garden beds and stone wall work.
I'm happy with his work and would recommend him, pricing was reasonable, quality good. read more
