In article ,
Jim wrote:
My house is on a hill and the garden slopes from left to right and
from front to back. The back right hand corner is currently a kids
play area with bark laid over a weed control fabric. The area gets
quite soggy/muddy though so I thought I might turn it into a patio
which hopefuly should make better use of the space.

I've looked at Cormaic's excellent site but jsut want to confirm that
I won't need a sub-base. Do I just lay a 40-50mm bed and place the
slabs directly onto this ? Also should I remove all the bark and
fabric first ?

Having had a bit of experience with patio slabs, here's some thoughts
of mine:

1) Patio slabs are *heavy* (even for blokes). The ones I was saddled
with (existed previously) were 60cmx90cm ones, and I'd recommend smaller,
much easier to manoeuvre.

2) Consider what's going to happen to the water. If that's an area
where water tends to collect, that's not just going to stop because you've
got a patio there. Can the water drain elsewhere? Will it sit on top
of your patio causing puddles? Or will you just have slabs on top of
an unstable soggy site?

3) You only want to lay each slab once. Taking care to have a nice
flat smooth sand bed for the slab to go on is much needed. If the
slab can find a tiny unevenness to wobble on, it will!

4) The top end of my patio is slabs laid on a little layer of sandy
gravelly soil (well I don't know what it was originally but that's
what it looks like now) with dabs of mortar underneath. It has been
absolutely fine not laid on a subbase.

5) Consider the cracks in between paving slabs. If you have gaps,
even a few mm, soil *will* get in there and you *will* have to weed
frequently.

Sharon