A dip in the surface means the base underneath has lost material or was never compacted properly. The pavers themselves are almost always sound. We lift the settled section, identify what caused the base to fail, rebuild it to the right grade and reset the same stone flush with the surrounding surface.
The stone sitting on top of a settled area is rarely damaged. What has failed is the layer underneath it. Water running through the base carries away the fine material that locks the granular stone together, leaving loose gravel that compacts a little more with every load that crosses it.
This is why the low spot keeps getting lower instead of settling once and staying put.
Three things cause it in this climate: a downspout discharging water onto the surface, a grade that slopes toward the paved area instead of away from it, and an open perimeter with no edge restraint letting the field creep outward until joints open and sand washes out with every rain.
We identify which one is at work before we quote the job, because lifting without fixing the source is a repair with an expiry date. Learn what base repair involves, how to handle water that pools, and why perimeter restraint stops the creep.
Sunken Pavers
How It Runs
Four steps from a dip to a flush surface
Mark the real extent
A string line across the area shows where the settlement actually stops, which is usually a course or two past what you can see from the door.
Lift and stack in order
Pavers come up and are stacked in the order they came off, so the same faces go back to the front and the pattern closes the way it opened.
Rebuild the granular base in lifts
Clean stone goes in and is compacted in layers, with geotextile over soft subgrade. A single deep lift packs at the top and stays loose underneath, which is the same fault again.
Relay, tamp and re-sand
Stone reset to the surrounding grade, plate tamped through a protective mat, and the joints refilled with new polymeric sand.
When Lifting Won't Work
Settling across the whole surface means something else
If the low spots run across most of the paved area rather than in isolated patches, the base was under-built from the start and lifting one section just moves the problem to the next low point. The same applies when the pavers themselves are spalling from de-icing salt, because the stone going back down is already failing.
We will tell you this on the site visit rather than after the surface is up. Explore what a full restoration costs, how base repair rebuilds washed-out material, and what cracked pavers involve, before you decide.
On the visitTold
Rebuild, not liftWhole-surface drop
Replace, not relaySpalled stone
Related Work
Other re-levelling work in Toronto
A sunken area rarely arrives on its own. These usually come with it.
Nearly always, because the stone is not what failed. Concrete pavers outlast the base they sit on by decades, so the work is under them rather than to them, and your existing units go straight back down.
Most single settled areas land between $800 and $2,400 depending on size and access. Below about a square metre it is rarely worth a call-out on its own.
Because the source has not changed. Water is still arriving there and still carrying base material away. Re-levelling without redirecting it buys you two or three seasons.
It matches in shape and pattern because the same stone goes back. Colour can read slightly lighter for a season where the paver had been shaded by the sand line.
Not properly, so we do not. Frozen ground cannot be compacted and the joint sand will not cure below about ten degrees, so a winter repair is one you pay for twice. Settled areas get booked for early spring.
Most single settled areas are a day, occasionally two if the base has to come out deeper than the lift suggested. You get the expected span in writing, and a call the same day if what we find under the surface changes it.
