A stamped concrete patio in Guelph
The patio sits behind a two-storey home near Exhibition Park, one of Guelph's mature, tree-lined pockets close to downtown. The homeowners wanted to replace a cracked interlock patio, roughly 420 sq ft, with something that would actually survive Guelph winters instead of heaving apart every spring.
We poured a single continuous stamped concrete slab in an ashlar-slate pattern with an integral charcoal-grey colour mixed into the concrete itself rather than applied as a surface stain, so the colour will not wear off the high-traffic areas near the back door. The slab is reinforced with wire mesh over a compacted granular base, sloped a quarter inch per foot away from the house, and finished with a solvent-based sealer that will need reapplying every two to three years to keep the colour and the slip resistance.
Excavation ran into the root system of a large silver maple about six feet from the planned edge of the patio, bigger and closer to the surface than expected. Cutting straight through it would have risked the tree; pouring directly over it would have cracked the slab within a couple of seasons as the roots kept growing. We pulled the patio's edge in by about a foot on that side, hand-dug around the major roots instead of trenching with the skid steer, and added an extra control joint aligned with the root line so any future movement there cracks along a joint instead of through the slab face.
The pour itself took four days, from excavation and forming to the final stamp and colour, with about a week's cure time before we opened it to full foot traffic and outdoor furniture. Total cost came in around $10,200, near the top of our $14 to $28 per sq ft range for patios given the ashlar-slate stamp pattern and integral colour, both of which take longer to finish than a plain broom surface. No permit was required. A patio replacement on an existing footprint like this one does not trigger permitting in Guelph the way a structural addition would.
We also tied the new patio's grading into the existing yard drainage rather than replacing it, since the lot itself already sloped correctly toward the side yard swale. That kept the scope contained to the patio itself instead of turning into a broader grading project, which is not always the case on older Guelph lots where decades of landscaping have flattened out the original slope.