5 Signs Your Contractor
Is Cutting Corners

The Shortcuts You Can't See Until It's Too Late

Most paver failures aren't paver failures. They're base failures wearing a paver costume. By the time you can see the problem — a dip, a rocking stone, a joint spreading open — the mistake happened months or years earlier, buried under the surface, on a day you weren't watching.

That's the uncomfortable part of hiring for this work: the corners that get cut are invisible on the walkthrough. Here are the five that actually matter, what they look like once they fail, and how to catch them before they're buried under your new driveway.

1. The Quote Came Fast, Generic, and Without a Site Visit

A real paver quote depends on your soil, your drainage, your slope, and your square footage — none of which a contractor can know from a phone call. If a number shows up before anyone's walked your property, it isn't a quote. It's a guess with a dollar sign on it.

The base spec a contractor needs — how deep, what material, how compacted — changes site to site. A quote that skipped that step didn't skip it by accident. It means whatever gets built will be built to a generic assumption, not to your yard.

2. The Base Got Skipped, or Shorted

This is the one that breaks everything else. Installers call it 80% of the job for a reason: base preparation is what actually determines whether a surface holds for decades or starts dipping within a season. Pavers laid directly on native soil, or on a base that wasn't compacted properly, will settle — not might, will. It's a matter of when, not if.

The fix on installation day looks identical to doing it right — a flat, clean surface, ready for pavers. The difference only shows up later, usually within the first year, as sinking, rocking stones, or visible low spots where the ground gave way underneath. By then, the contractor is long gone and the surface has to be pulled up and redone from the ground up. There's no patching a bad base.

3. No Edge Restraint — Or Restraint With Nothing Behind It

Edge restraint is what keeps a paver field from slowly spreading apart at the borders as traffic pushes against it over time. Skipping it outright is an obvious shortcut. The less obvious version — and the one that actually trips up a lot of installs — is restraint that's technically there but doesn't have enough base extending underneath and beyond it.

According to the Interlocking Concrete Pavement Institute, insufficient base extension past the edge restraint is the single most common installation error in the industry — more common than skipping the restraint entirely. It looks correct at handoff. It fails the same way regardless: gaps opening at the edges, pavers drifting out of pattern, usually starting in the first one to two years.

4. Nobody Can Show You the Base Before the Pavers Went Down

The base is the part of the job nobody thinks to ask about, which is exactly why it's the part worth asking about. A contractor confident in their base work will have photos — compaction in progress, base depth before the first paver ever went down. A contractor who can't produce that, or gets vague when you ask, likely doesn't have it because there's nothing worth photographing.

This is a two-minute question that tells you more than anything on the sales pitch: can I see the base before you covered it up?

5. Licensing and Insurance Aren't Offered Up Front

In Florida, hiring an unlicensed contractor isn't just a risk to the quality of the work — it's a legal one for you specifically. Under Florida Statute 455.228, a homeowner who knowingly hires an unlicensed contractor can be treated as aiding unlicensed activity, with civil penalties running $500 to $5,000 per offense, plus potential liability for investigation costs if it goes to the state.

Checking this takes two minutes at myfloridalicense.com — license status, expiration, and any disciplinary history, all public. A contractor with nothing to hide will hand you their license number before you ask for it.

What We Do Differently

We don't quote a job without walking the site first — soil, slope, and drainage decide the spec, and none of those show up over the phone. Every job gets a four-inch compacted aggregate base, minimum, with the compaction and extension checked before a single paver goes down — and we'll show you the photos, because we take them anyway for our own records. Edge restraint goes in with base underneath and beyond it, not just pinned to the surface. And our license and insurance are part of the first conversation, not something you have to ask for.

None of that is a sales pitch. It's just what happens when the crew that builds it is the same crew that has to stand behind it in year three.

Before You Sign Anything

If a contractor can't answer these five things clearly — the site visit, the base plan, the edge restraint detail, the photos, the license — that's the answer. Ask anyway. The ones with nothing to hide will be glad you did.