So, you’ve decided to get pavers installed at your home, FANTASTIC! Now comes the fun part, the actual selection of color and style. It’s your chance to put your own personal touch on your future project! This part of the process is typically easy, if and only if, you go to select your pavers in person. You may wonder why it’s such a big deal to pick pavers in person, considering the extra hassle it might be to drive all the way to the Paver Solution’s display.

The reason is, pavers never look identical to their picture counterparts. Never. There are always variations, sometimes subtle and sometimes more obvious. It’s always better to get a closer look. Here’s why:

Color

The biggest reason to take that trip to your paver’s showroom is COLOR. Paver colors vary greatly. Even within one single color selection, the tones will differ. This is in large part due to the manufacturing process. Pavers at the beginning of a manufacturing run will be much darker than they will at the end of a run. The tone is never as deep at the end of the process as it is at the onset, so the first 50 pallets of pavers created may be quite a bit richer in color than the last 50.  By the same token, the pavers in the middle of a batch will be somewhere in between.

Also, it’s hard to represent color on a screen the same way it is in real life. Pictures online may give you a general idea, but you don’t get the fully effect of a color until you’ve seen it in the sunlight. Speaking of sunlight, it vastly can affect how a paver color looks. A dark colored paver that gets little to no sunlight, might not work for an area that is meant to be light and bright,  while a lighter color paver may appear blinding with too much of the sun’s rays.

Texture

Pavers come in all types of beautiful textures. Anything ranging from very smooth and sleek, to coarse and jagged. The textures add to the visual interest of an outdoor landscaping design, but it’s very difficult to know how exactly the texture will look and feel by just looking at a picture on a website. Texture on a paver is something you must feel.

Only when you touch it with your hands, will you know if a certain paver is right for your patio, or driveway, or front door steps. For example, many people look at pictures of travertine pavers and assume that they will be slippery. But when you feel travertine in person and walk on it, you see that the stone is actually quite porous, and they’re not as slippery as they look.

Additionally, you may see a textured pattern that looks great in a picture, but in person the pavers feel too rough for your application. Therefore, texture is incredibly important when choosing the right paver, and it’s best to see and touch the pavers in person before you select them.

 

We highly recommend that you stop by our showroom to get a feel for pavers before making any big design decisions. Or, you could ask us to bring you a few samples to borrow, so that you can really inspect them personally. You can observe how they look in different weather conditions, how the color looks with your current landscaping, and you can really get a good sense of the textures you will be bringing into your space. Though it takes additional effort, seeing and feeling pavers in person is really the way to go.