Trade
Paving and terrace
Why a terrace goes out of level here, and what has to sit underneath to stop it.
Paving in Amsterdam-Noord is eighty per cent groundworks and twenty per cent stone. Reverse that and you get a handsome terrace that ripples after five years. What goes underneath is a compacted base with a grading that lets water through, and above it a laying course thick enough to be repaired without lifting everything.
The bond pattern is not decoration. A half-bond shifts less than a stack bond because the joints do not run through, and in a garden where the subsoil moves that is the difference between relaying a patch and relaying the lot. Where a terrace meets the house we keep two centimetres clear of the brickwork and fill it with grit, so the paving can move without pushing against the wall.
Fall is compulsory and it always runs away from the house. We lay to at least one centimetre per metre, and where water has nowhere to run by itself a channel drain or a soakaway crate goes in. A terrace without fall is not a terrace but a bath, and on this ground it fills.
Closed over at most
50%
We will not build a garden that is more than half hard surface. On this ground the water has to go somewhere.
Lead time
3 to 6
Working days for a garden up to a hundred square metres, spread over two weeks.
We come back within
12mo
Anything we plant that fails to take, we replace within a year at no cost.
What you can check yourself
Run a level from the doorstep to the furthest slab. If it falls towards the house, that is not a matter of relaying a few slabs but of the base underneath them.
What we bring
A plate compactor with a rubber mat for clay units, laying sand and grit kept separate, and a channel drain cut to length. No glued edge restraint: it cracks along with the settling ground.
What handover means
The level goes over it once more at handover, with you standing there, and leftover material stays behind for a future repair rather than going back on the van.
First whether it can be done, then what it costs
Photograph the spot where the water stands. That answers half the question on its own.
The background, if you want to read further
Choosing between concrete slabs, clay pavers and porcelain is not only a matter of looks on this ground. Large porcelain tiles are hard and flat, and precisely because of that a settlement of two centimetres shows immediately; a smaller clay paver absorbs the same movement without it being noticeable. In a garden sitting on a made-up layer that settles unevenly, the smaller unit is often the wiser choice, even when the larger one photographs better.
Costs split more cleanly on this trade than on the others. Of the sources we scanned, TuinHub is the only one that publishes labour and materials separately: for concrete pavers 20 to 40 euro of material and 15 to 25 euro of labour per square metre, for clay pavers 30 to 45 plus 20 to 30, and 10 to 25 euro per square metre for lifting and disposing of old paving. That source does not state whether its figures include Dutch VAT, and our prices page says so in as many words.
What we will not do is close a garden over completely. That is not a principle but soil mechanics: the made-up layer is the only permeable layer under these neighbourhoods, and whatever cannot soak into it ends up on the street or against the wall. The city and its water utility have run a programme for this since 2014, renamed Amsterdam Weerproof on 8 February 2024, including a tile collection service and a separate page for Noord.
Questions about paving and terrace
What does paving cost per square metre?
We charge 70 to 120 euro per square metre including Dutch VAT (btw) to renew a terrace or a path, including lifting and disposing of what was there. The bottom of that band is a concrete slab on an existing base that is still sound; the top is a clay paver on a new base with a channel drain.
Can my old paving be reused?
Often yes, and it saves on both material and disposal. Clay pavers almost always go into a second life; thirty-by-thirty concrete slabs usually do too, provided roots have not cracked them. What does not come back is anything with cement stuck to the underside: it was bedded in mortar once, and cleaning it costs more than new.
How much hard surfacing is too much?
We will not build a garden that is more than half closed over. That is the limit we set ourselves, and on this ground it is not strict but tight: water that does not soak into your garden ends up in a crawl space or next door. If you want more paving than that, we are the wrong firm, and we would rather say so on the first call than in the quotation.
What happens to the old tiles?
In Amsterdam garden tiles need not go in a skip. The tile collection service run by Amsterdam Weerproof and the city takes them away free if they are stacked at the kerb, and there is a separate collection round for Noord. We register it and stack them, which takes a disposal item off your quotation.
Torn between two solutions
Put both to us. We will say which of the two lasts longer on this ground, and why.
The neighbourhoods where we do this
What this trade means in practice differs per neighbourhood. The page for your own one says what applies where you live.
What else people call us for
Your request
Six fields and a photo. With the area and the type of garden we can name a band before coming out; without those two, any answer is a guess.
Start with a photo
One photo from the back door showing the whole garden almost always saves a trip. Send two if you like: one of the whole and one of the spot where it goes wrong.