Ottawa's One-Stop Shop for Exterior Home Improvements

Interlock is the core of what we do. New installations, lift and relay on settled or heaved stone, repairs, re-sanding and sealing — all of it handled by the same owner-involved crew from excavation through to the final joint sand.

Steps are the one piece of hardscaping that becomes a safety problem when it fails. Frost heave lifts one riser out of line, a landing settles toward the door, a corner crumbles — and suddenly the main entrance to the house is something people have to think about on the way in.

A retaining wall is a structure holding back soil, and soil gets much heavier when it is saturated. Walls that lean, bulge or step out of line are almost always walls that were built without drainage behind them — no clear stone, no drainage pipe, no way for water to escape except by pushing on the wall.

Parging is the cement coating on the exposed part of your foundation between the ground and the siding or brick. It is there to protect the concrete or block underneath from water and freeze-thaw damage, and it is usually the first part of a house to start looking tired — crumbling at the bottom edge, flaking off in sheets, or patched so many times it has gone blotchy.

Water pooling against a foundation is the most expensive problem on this list to ignore. It saturates the soil beside the house, finds its way through cracks and cold joints, and in winter it freezes and expands against the structure. Most of the foundation repairs we get called for started as a grading problem nobody dealt with.

Pressure washing is the cheapest curb-appeal improvement there is. Siding that has gone green on the north side, interlock darkened with years of organic growth, a concrete driveway that has not been clean since it was poured — most of that is surface, and most of it comes off.

Masonry work on a house is visible from the street, which means a poor repair is permanently obvious. Mismatched brick, mortar in the wrong colour, joints that do not line up — all of it reads from the sidewalk.

Lighting is the step most exterior projects skip, and it is the one that changes how the house looks for the half of the year when it is dark at five o'clock. Lit steps are safer. A lit facade has presence from the street. Uplit stone shows the texture you paid for.

This is the work that makes a property look finished rather than just improved. A new patio with bare dirt and weeds around it is only part of a job. River rock beds, defined borders, raised planting beds and fresh sod are what tie the hardscaping into the rest of the yard.