If it’s time for hardscape design, it’s time to call Unit Paving. For nearly three decades, we’ve helped homeowners, businesses, and municipalities in North and South Carolina with a range of residential and commercial hardscaping needs. Our clientele know us for our extensive — and often creative — use of concrete pavers in our projects. If you’re new to this material, here’s what you should know.
What is Hardscaping?
Let’s start by establishing what hardscaping is: the other half (with softscapes, or the growing material used in a given space) of the landscaping equation. It’s the manmade portion of your landscaping, encompassing everything from your driveway and footpath to retaining walls, fire pits, and much more.
Hardscaping and Sustainable Design
When it’s properly done — with the right design and materials — hardscaping is a key part of sustainable landscaping. Whether you’re hardscaping a yard, a park, or a pedestrian plaza in a municipal downtown, hardscaping with concrete pavers is a good way to reduce runoff, pollution, and soil erosion. It conserves finite resources and preserves the natural environment.
Advantages of Concrete Pavers
Concrete paving products come with a number of built-in advantages.
Variety
When most people think of pavers, they think of bland expanses of lookalike bricks. Unit Paving has worked with concrete pavers long enough to know, appreciate, and embrace the diverse options available to homeowners and town planners alike. Shape, color, and texture choices can be varied for function and beauty alike.
Simplicity
Concrete pavers are simple to install thanks to their ease of installation, minimal site preparation, and minimal use of added equipment. The same cannot be said of traditional paving materials like asphalt and concrete.
Strength
Concrete and asphalt are impervious structures. They’re also inflexible. That can have some advantages, but there’s also a built-in drawback that you’ll have noticed if you’ve ever driven over a buckled surface undermined by rushing water, hit a pothole, or noticed the flooding they encourage. Concrete pavers allow water to pass through to the soil, they expand and contract thanks to their joint structure, and their ease of replacement means that repairs can be done quickly and easily.
Flood Control
Whether you’re a homeowner whose yard pools with water because of poor drainage, or a municipality that deals with flooding after anything more severe than light drizzle, you’ll appreciate the fact that concrete pavers require less drainage than other paved surfaces.
Long-Term Savings
Concrete and asphalt surfaces often require extensive — and expensive — maintenance, as well as frequent repairs. To be clear, all paved surfaces require maintenance, but concrete pavers require less of it.
Surface maintenance of concrete pavers is simple, and there’s less of it. When repairs are needed — which isn’t often, but is always a possibility — they can often be done by one or two people in a matter of minutes, minimizing disruption to traffic and everyday life.
Answering Concrete Paver Questions
It’s impossible to answer all of the frequently asked paver questions in blog form. What we’ve addressed here may have reinforced information you already knew, or may have left you with as many questions as answers. Unit Paving is happy to take the time to consider the scope of your project and answer the questions that matter most to you. So contact us by phone at (704) 412-4463 or visit us online to schedule a concrete paver consultation.