How to Lay the Perfect Pavers

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How to Lay the Perfect Pavers

It’s time to get outside and do something nice for your property.

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By

Tim Heffernan

April 24, 2026

My favorite sign of spring this year was the arrival of new sidewalks, courtesy of my town. It meant I could finally install a permanent brick border along the edge of my front yard — the first step in converting it to a native-plant garden.

Paved borders bring order to unruly outdoor spaces, and my patch of struggling grass and thriving invasives is certainly that. They’re straightforward to install, the necessary materials and tools are few, and the method is the same whether you use clay, stone or precast concrete pavers.

With an eye on a summer of gardening, laying a border is our project this month.

Image

The McAvoy paver survived a century in the ground unscathed. The S&F masonry brick, taken from a patio in my backyard, is one of a handful that hadn’t crumbled to pieces.

Before we get to work, a word on the clay bricks I used: They are true pavers, which are made of dense clay that’s vitrified — fired at an extremely high temperature — to make them impervious to heavy loads, constant moisture and repeated freeze-thaw cycles. That’s why they’re typically used for roadways and pedestrian plazas. If you want a clay-brick border, you’ll want to use pavers, too. They cost more than the conventional bricks used for walls, but will last much longer. (I got lucky: My pavers were dug up when our town installed new sewer mains, and the road crew was happy to let me have them. They were in fine shape after spending a century in the ground.)

Once you’ve chosen your material, it’s time to gather the rest of what you’ll need:

Tools and Materials

Image

You don’t need many tools to lay a garden border. I wound up not using the edger on the left.

A straight-edged

spade

is really the only hand tool you’ll need. Use it to cut a neat edge for your border, slice out sod, and excavate the trench that your paving material will lie in.

A

hoe

and

tamper

will make a couple of these steps easier, but the spade can do the hoe’s job and a piece of 4x4 timber, a cinder block or a heavy round of firewood can stand in for the tamper.

Use two

stakes

(I used shims that I had lying around) and a length of

string

to set a straight border line. To lay out a curved border, use loose string or rope. A piece of

scrap wood

about half an inch thick will help you set a consistent gap between bricks or other straight-edged pavers.

A

level

(or any straightedge about two feet long) will help you keep your pavers level as you lay them in place.

A stiff-bristled

brush

helps spread the dry sand that fills the gaps between pavers in the final step.

As you dig, put the soil and sod onto a

tarp

.

It will make cleanup a lot easier

Image

Paver base and leveling sand come in half-cubic-foot sacks; more would be unwieldy.

I did this job by the book, using a premixed

paver base

(typically made of crushed rock), followed by a layer of

leveling sand

, and finally

polymeric sand

(sand mixed with a moisture-activated binder) to fill the gaps between the pavers. The first two provide a much more stable and durable foundation than bare dirt or gravel alone, but I think plain, dry

paver sand

is fine as a filler for a garden border, and it’s much cheaper than polymeric. You’ll find all of these at garden centers and big hardware stores.

Step 1: Lay out your border and cut the trench.

Image

I first cut back a wide strip of sod because I needed to regrade the yard to the level of the new sidewalk. The trench you need to dig for a border will be much narrower.

The edge of the sidewalk gave me a straight edge to lay one end of my bricks against, and I used two sticks and garden twine to set out the other edge of the trench in which they’d eventually lie. In an open garden bed, you can use two strings arranged in parallel to define both edges at once. To set their width apart, just place a paver at either end of the border line and align the strings with their ends.

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