Paver Repair and Releveling in Tucson

Properly, it is four steps: lift the affected pavers keeping them in order, find and fix whatever is putting water into that area, rebuild the base to full depth and compact it in lifts, then re-screed and relay. The step people skip is the second one, and skipping it is why the same area sinks again. Adding sand under the pavers without touching the base is a temporary flattening rather than a repair.

If individual units are cracked or chipped, they come out and get replaced, which is the main practical advantage of a paver surface over a slab. Matching is the tricky part on an older surface, since colour softens with sun exposure. Where an exact match is impossible we will often take replacements from an inconspicuous area, such as under furniture or against a wall, and put the new units there instead.

From the base up. Lift the area, correct and compact the base to proper depth, then re-screed a consistent bedding layer and relay. Levelling by adding sand under individual pavers gives you a surface that is flat today and consolidates unevenly over the following months, because loose sand under a load always finds its own level eventually.

A single rocking paver usually means the joint sand around it has gone, so it is no longer sharing load with its neighbours, or that the bedding beneath that one unit has washed out. Refilling the joints properly fixes a surprising number of these. If it still rocks afterwards, lift that unit, check what is under it and re-bed it. If several nearby units rock, treat it as a base problem rather than a paver problem.

For a proper repair, compacted aggregate base with a thin screeded bedding layer on top, exactly as in a new installation. What people commonly reach for instead is loose sand, which works for a season. Never use soil or unwashed fill, and do not use a rigid mortar bed under a flexible pavement, because it prevents the surface from behaving as an interlocking system.

Releveling is priced by the area lifted and by how much base rebuilding it needs, and it is mostly labour because the pavers already exist. A small dip in an accessible area is at the bottom of the range. A large area, a poor original base, or restricted access that means barrowing base material through a side gate moves it up quickly.

Deal with the water and the edges, because those are the two mechanisms. Make sure roof downspouts discharge away from the surface rather than onto it, check irrigation is not soaking the base along one side, keep the joint sand topped up so the field shares load properly, and make sure every open edge has a working restraint. Those four things prevent most of what we get called out to.