Can you lay pavers on a sand base?

[julian27845]

Hi All, I'm working on clearing the walkway around my house to prepare for some pavers and stones / pebbles around it, ideally I would like to do this myself since I expect the cost of getting this done with tradies would be in the thousands

When I search for guides online I notice a lot of them recommend using cement to lay the pavers then filling with the stones around it. I'm not very experienced with cement and was hoping to avoid it and maybe go with something like the below link suggests (using road base and sand), this is closer to my skillset

Link

https://www.workshop.bunnings.com.au/t5/Featured-Projects/Travertine-pavers-and-gravel-garden-path/t...

Just wanted to get some advice on this, is it ok to lay pavers like this onto road base and sand? or should I use cement instead? or is there another way?

Regards, Julian

[JacobZ]

Hi Julian (@julian27845),

There are no issues whatsoever with laying pavers over a base of road base and paving sand. This is called dry-laying pavers.

You can check out How To Prepare For Paving and How To Pave a Pathway for some guidance on dry-laying pavers.

Another option is to wet-lay your pavers using a base of road base with mortar over the top.

You may not be confident with concrete, but mortar is very easy to work with and makes it very easy to get things nice and level. You should consider using mortar over paving sand as paving sand will require you to get everything perfectly level before laying your pavers. Using mortar will allow you to adjust each paver for level by tapping it with a rubber mallet. 

Check out How To Prepare And Lay a Base For Pavers for some guidance on base preparation and How To Lay Pavers for an example of a road base and mortar approach to paving.

Let me know what you think.

Jacob