Five surfaces, one level, one plan.
Hardscaping Services Across Georgia
Hardscaping is everything in a backyard that is hard and does not grow: paving, decking around the pool, walls, driveways, steps and paths. It gets sold as five separate products and it is one continuous surface, which is why it is worth having one contractor set out the whole thing before any of it is poured.
Aqualis Pools also takes on projects across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Structure, Style, and Lasting Value
The Pool Sets the Level, and Everything Hard Follows It
In a backyard with a pool, one height is fixed before anything else: the top of the pool coping. It is set by the pool, it cannot move afterwards, and every paved surface that touches it has to arrive at that height. The pool deck takes its level from the coping, the patio takes its level from the deck, the steps take theirs from the patio, and a path from the driveway has to land at the right height at the far end.
That is why the order matters more here than in any other part of a backyard. Paving laid before the pool is set out is paving laid to a level nobody has confirmed yet. Where a project runs in stages over two or three years, the levels for all of it are still worth setting once, at the start, on a drawing, even if only the first stage gets built.
Get it wrong and the fixes are all expensive in the same way: a step where nobody wanted one, a threshold that traps water against the house, or concrete that has to come out. None of it can be adjusted the way a plant can be moved.
Every Hard Surface Is Rain You Have to Put Somewhere
A lawn takes rain and holds it. Paving does not. So every square foot of hardscape added to a property is a square foot of rain that now has to run somewhere, and where it runs is decided by falls of an inch or two that nobody notices when they are right and everybody notices when they are wrong.
Beside a pool there are two directions the water must not go: into the pool, which is what carries dirt and lawn chemicals into the water, and back against the house. That leaves the direction it should go, which is somewhere with capacity to take it, and it is designed with the paving rather than after it.
This is also what retaining walls do on a sloping Georgia lot: they hold ground back so that a flat area can exist at all. What decides whether a wall lasts is what happens to the water behind it, which is buried and invisible on the day it is finished.
Grading and drainage sound like the boring part. They are the part that decides whether the good-looking part still looks good in five years.
What Each Piece Is, and When You Want It
Paver patios: the seating and dining area. Pavers rather than a poured slab where you want a surface that can be lifted and relaid if anything underneath ever needs reaching.
Pool decking: the surface immediately around the water. Different job from a patio because it is walked on with wet feet, it has to fall away from the pool rather than towards it, and what it feels like underfoot in August matters more than what it looks like.
Pool deck resurfacing: the option where the concrete around the pool is sound and only the surface has failed. Worth pricing before anyone talks about replacement, because the answer is sometimes a resurface and a decision made in an afternoon.
Retaining walls: when the ground will not stay where you need it. On a sloping lot this is what buys the flat area everything else sits on, so it comes early in the build order rather than late.
Walkways and pathways: how people actually get from the driveway to the back door and from the back door to the pool, including at night and including with wet feet. A small part of the budget, and the part that gets walked on every day.
Driveways: the front of the property, a different load case because vehicles are on it, and the piece that sets what a visitor thinks before they reach anything else.
One that is not hardscaping, named here because people ask for it in the same conversation: a custom deck is framed and built up on posts rather than paved onto the ground. Where the ground falls away sharply, that is the answer instead of a wall and a fill, and it is a different trade and a different price.
What Makes Paving Last, and What Makes It Fail
Materials are the visible decision and not the one that decides how long the surface lasts. Pavers, poured concrete, natural stone and brick all work, they differ in price, in how they age and in what they do underfoot when wet, and any of them will fail early on a bad base.
What a paved surface lasts on is what is underneath it and what holds its edges. The ground has to be prepared and compacted before anything goes on it, and the edges have to be restrained, because paving that can spread sideways eventually does. Both are buried by the time the job looks finished, which is exactly why they are the things to ask about while quotes are still being compared.
The other honest point about material: around a pool, surface texture is a safety decision and a comfort decision before it is a style decision, because it is walked on barefoot and wet. That narrows the list faster than any photograph will.
What Hardscaping Costs
Area is the obvious driver and it is not the interesting one. What moves a hardscaping number is how much the ground has to be changed to accept the surface: a flat site that needs preparing is one price, a sloping site that needs a wall and fill before anything can be laid is another.
After that: the material, whether the surface carries vehicles, how much of the fall has to be engineered rather than found, whether drainage has to be run, how far machinery can get to the work, and how many separate surfaces are being tied into one another.
Where hardscaping is part of a larger backyard project, pool financing options apply to it in the same way they apply to the pool.
Doing It With the Pool, or Doing It in Stages
With the pool is cheaper in every direction. The machinery is on site, the ground is already open, the levels are set once for the water, the coping and the paving together, and the whole surface is drawn as one thing. That is the argument for putting hardscaping into the same drawing during new pool construction rather than treating it as the phase after.
In stages is normal and there is nothing wrong with it, as long as the levels for the whole scheme are set at the start. Where the rest of the backyard program is also being planned, structures, cooking, fire and shade, the order that runs in is set out on our outdoor living page. That page owns the order of the project. This one owns the surface it all stands on.
What Our Clients Say
Aqualis Pools is rated 5.0 on Google, from a small number of reviews, and every one of them can be read on the profile.
Hardscaping Across Georgia
We design and build hardscaping for homeowners in Lawrenceville, Buford, Loganville, Athens, Auburn and nearby Georgia communities. The full list is on our service areas page, and finished work is in the gallery.
Frequently Asked Questions
Hardscaping is the built, non-living part of a yard: paver patios, the decking around a pool, retaining walls, driveways, steps and walkways. On a property with a pool it is worth thinking of as one continuous surface rather than six products, because the levels of each piece are set by the pieces next to it and ultimately by the pool itself.
Pavers, poured concrete, natural stone and brick are the common choices. They differ in price, in how they age and in how they feel underfoot, and around a pool that last point is the one to weigh first, because the surface is walked on barefoot and wet. What matters more than the material is what goes under it: ground that has been prepared and compacted, and edges restrained so the paving cannot spread. A good material on a poor base fails early.
Not necessarily built, but it does have to be set out. The top of the pool coping is a fixed height that everything else has to meet, so paving laid before that level is known is paving laid to a guess. Where a project runs in stages over a few years, the sensible approach is to set the levels for the whole scheme on a drawing at the start and then build it in whatever order suits the budget.
Somewhere it was not going before, which is the point of designing it. Hard surfaces do not absorb rain, so falls are built into the paving to take it away from the pool and away from the house, and on some sites that means drainage as well as fall. Grading and drainage get decided at the same time as the layout rather than added at the end, because the fix afterwards is lifting the surface you just paid for.
Yes. The condition is that the levels and the falls for the whole scheme are worked out before the first stage is built, so each phase lands where the next one needs it to. Done that way, a patio this year and a pool deck in two years meet properly. Done without it, the second phase inherits whatever the first one left behind.
It depends on the area, on how much the ground has to be changed before anything can be laid, on whether walls or drainage are part of it, and on access for machinery.
Start Planning Your Hardscaping
Two answers get this moving. Does your yard slope, and if so which way? And is there a pool already in, or is one coming? The first decides how much of the budget goes into ground you will never see again. The second decides whether the levels are already fixed or still yours to set.
Call (770) 373-8405 with those two answers, or send us a message and we will come back with something specific.