New Masonry in Syracuse: Stone Veneer, Paver Patios and Fire Features

Compare the parts you cannot see. Everybody is quoting the same stone, so the difference is usually the excavation, the base depth, the compaction, the drainage and the month the work lands in. Ask each contractor for the compacted base depth in inches, for where water leaves the assembly, and for what cold weather protection is in the price if the job runs past early October. The hardscape specification's own minimum for a patio is 4 inches of compacted base, and only over well drained soil. A quote that answers all three has been thought about. A quote that cannot answer any of them is cheap for a reason you will meet in about four springs.

Not for a patio. A dry laid paver patio at grade carries no footing at all, which is exactly why unit paving flexes where a slab would crack, and the industry specification states plainly that a small amount of settling is typical of all flexible paving. Footings below the frost line are for structures: an outdoor fireplace, a tall pillar, a chimney. New York does not even publish a statewide frost depth, because the code leaves that column blank for each jurisdiction to fill in, so the only authoritative number is the one your own town's code office gives you on the phone. If someone is quoting a 42 inch footing under a patio, they are describing a footing for something that is not a patio, and you do not need us to tell them so.

No. Sealing is an appearance decision and a recurring one. Sealers darken the surface and bring up the color, they need redoing as they wear, and nothing structural depends on them. There are two ways it goes wrong here. Applied over joints or a base that are still wet, or over a base that drains poorly, a sealer can cloud, and it then has to be removed or redissolved at your expense. And on brickwork that is still carrying salts to the surface, a coating can stop them at its own inner margin, an eighth to a quarter of an inch below the face, where they crystallize and take pieces off the brick. If what actually annoys you is sand washing out of the joints, the right product is a joint sand stabilizer rather than a surface sealer.

Probably not yet. Efflorescence on brickwork less than a year old has its own name, new building bloom, appears fairly uniformly across the wall, and comes from water left in the materials by construction. It typically weathers off on its own. Efflorescence needs three conditions at once: soluble salts, water in contact with them long enough to dissolve them, and a pore structure that carries the solution to a surface where it can evaporate. Washing removes the mark and none of the three. So if the bloom is in its first year, wait. If it keeps returning after that, the thing worth paying somebody to look at is where the water is getting in, not the stain.

That depends on the job and on what the quote covers, and the answer is not automatically no. Below 40 degrees Fahrenheit the specification changes rather than stopping: the sand or the mixing water is heated so the mortar leaves the mixer between 40 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and the new work is covered and held warm for 24 hours, or 48 hours where it has been grouted. That protection costs money and takes time. So the question is not whether your contractor works in November, it is whether November has been priced and detailed as November. At Syracuse the window needing none of it runs about 149 days, and October is the turn, with 12.8 nights below 40 degrees and more rain than any other month.

More than most people ask for. New York's General Business Law names patios, terraces, driveways, landscaping, fences and porches as home improvement, so this work sits inside Article 36-A. The contract has to carry the approximate start and substantial completion dates and any contingency that would materially change the completion date, which is the clause that makes the build season conversation enforceable. Progress payments have to be set out in dollars and cents against named stages of the work. Money paid before completion is required to be held under the Lien Law unless the contractor posts a bond, a contract of indemnity or an irrevocable letter of credit instead. And you can cancel until midnight of the third business day after you sign, which is long enough to get a second quote read properly.