How pavers are installed, base up

Why the sequence is not the same on every West Hills lot

The steps below are universal. Their depth and specification are not, and in this community that distinction matters more than it does in most. The flat tracts through the middle and east of town, on the streets running off Sherman Way and Vanowen, sit on alluvial sands and gravels that drain freely and compact predictably. That is cooperative subgrade, and a section built to standard depth on it performs for decades.

The sloping benches west of Valley Circle Boulevard, rising toward Castle Peak and the Simi Hills, sit on expansive high-plasticity clay. It swells with winter rain and shrinks through summer, and it will move a pavement that was not designed for it. The same nine steps apply there, but excavation goes deeper, geotextile stops being optional, aggregate depth increases, and drainage becomes a designed element rather than a detail. Reading the ground correctly is the first professional judgment of the job.

The nine steps

1. Walk the site and measure

   Before any number is quoted, the contractor looks at how the lot falls, where roof and hillside water currently travels, the height of the garage threshold and any door sills, the condition of the existing surface, and how material will reach the work area. On gated addresses this is also where gate clearance, crew lists, and association review get raised. The output of this step is a written, itemized quote rather than a verbal figure.

2. Demolish and remove the old surface

   A great many driveways here date from the 1960s through the 1990s, so removal of cracked concrete or tired asphalt is often the first physical work and frequently the largest single line item. It belongs on the quote as its own line, not buried inside a per-foot rate. The debris is hauled away rather than left to sit on the street.

3. Excavate to subgrade

   Excavation depth is set by use and by soil. A patio or walkway generally comes out around seven to nine inches below finished grade, a driveway around eleven to fourteen. Clay lots go deeper still. The subgrade is then proof-rolled and compacted so the material receiving the base is itself stable.

4. Place geotextile separation

   On clay and on any soft or variable subgrade, a woven geotextile is laid between soil and aggregate. Its purpose is separation: fine soil cannot migrate up into the base, and base stone cannot punch down into the soil. On the clay benches west of Valley Circle Boulevard this layer is what keeps a base from quietly disappearing over several wet seasons.

5. Build the aggregate base in lifts

   Graded aggregate is placed in layers of roughly three to four inches and compacted after each one. A patio typically receives four to six inches of finished base, a driveway eight to twelve. Placing the full depth at once and compacting from the top produces a surface that looks correct and settles later, because compaction energy simply does not reach the bottom of a deep lift. This is the single most common corner cut in the trade.

6. Set the drainage and the fall

   Water is given somewhere deliberate to go before anything decorative happens. That means building in cross-fall, usually around a quarter inch per foot running away from the house, and adding channel drains, subsurface drainage, or a permeable section where slope, hillside runoff, or a low threshold demands it. A pavement that sheds water properly ages far better than one that merely looks level.

7. Screed the bedding layer and lay the field

   A thin bedding course, about an inch, is screeded flat and left uncompacted so the pavers can seat into it. Units are then laid from a controlled starting line, with string lines checked regularly to keep the pattern true. Herringbone at forty five or ninety degrees gives the strongest interlock under vehicle load, which is why the concrete paver application guide recommends it wherever traffic runs continually. Perimeter cuts and the border or soldier course are made last, cut wet to control dust.

8. Install edge restraint

   Every open edge receives a rigid restraint, spiked or concreted according to the situation. This is the detail that decides whether a field holds its shape or slowly ravels outward at the perimeter. On sloping ground the profile is heavier, because the restraint is resisting real lateral pressure rather than simply defining a line.

9. Sweep joint sand, compact, and clean up

   Joint sand is swept across the field and vibrated home with a plate compactor over a protective pad, then topped up and vibrated again until the joints are genuinely full. The whole surface is compacted so it settles as one plane rather than unit by unit. Finally the staging area and street are cleared, the field is rinsed, and the crew walks the finished work with you. A small stock of matching pavers is left behind for any future repair.

Section depths at a glance

Add a day or two for hillside grading, retaining, or restricted access. Installed pricing for each project type is listed on the West Hills cost guide.

What this looks like on West Hills lots, in practice

Here is how those nine steps land in the field for the team laying pavers in West Hills. On a flat tract driveway near Vanowen, the work is orderly and largely uneventful: demolition on day one, excavation and base through day two and three, laying and cutting on day four, joints and cleanup on day five. The alluvial subgrade cooperates, and the crew's attention goes to compaction density and consistent depth through the wheel paths.

On a bench lot west of Valley Circle Boulevard, or up in Box Canyon, the same nine steps take on a different weight. Excavation is deeper and the spoil larger, geotextile goes down as standard, more aggregate has to be delivered and placed in more lifts, and drainage is engineered behind and beneath the section. Access shapes the schedule as much as the construction does. In Bell Canyon, Sterling at West Hills, and Hidden Lake, gate clearance and crew lists are arranged in advance and pallet drops are planned for narrow, winding roads with little shoulder, so the street stays usable for neighbors and the crew is not carrying base rock by hand.

One climate note worth carrying into the material selection you make at step one. Summers here average in the mid to high 90s with strong UV, so light tan, buff, and warm gray units are the practical choice. They hold color through the seasons and stay cooler underfoot than dark charcoal or red. If you want to see the finished result before you commit, the paver driveway page covers vehicle-rated work in detail.

Knowing the build makes the comparison fairer. West Hills pavers against a poured slab runs it.

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