Most people start by choosing a stone, and it is the wrong end of the problem. The best outdoor spaces we have built began with somebody telling us how many people they wanted to sit down and when they would be out there.
So here is the order we work in, which you can do yourself long before you call anybody.
Sit outside for a week
Genuinely. Take a chair into the garden at the hours you imagine using it, and pay attention to where the sun is at five in the afternoon in July, where the mosquitoes are worst, which direction the noise comes from, and where the ground stays wet after rain.
That week will change your plan more than any amount of looking at photographs. We have moved patios fifteen feet on the strength of it.
Count chairs, not square feet
Six people around a table needs about twelve by fourteen feet once you allow for pushing chairs back. A seating wall holds roughly one person per two and a half feet. A grill needs three feet of clearance in front of it that nobody walks through.
Add those together and you have a size. Coming at it from the other direction, picking a number of square feet and then trying to fit furniture into it, is how you end up with a patio where the table has to be moved to open the back door.
Work out where the water goes
This is the unglamorous middle of the process and it is where projects succeed or fail here. Every square foot of paving is a square foot the ground no longer absorbs, and in a Florida summer that water has to go somewhere that is not your foundation or your neighbour’s yard.
Slope, drains, a dry well if the lot is flat. We plan this before we plan anything you can see, and if your grade needs correcting first, we will tell you that even when it delays the interesting part.
Decide what is built and what is furniture
Built things are permanent, and they cost more, and they make a space feel finished. Seating walls, fire pits, kitchen bases. Furniture is flexible and cheap and can be wrong without consequence.
Our advice is usually to build less than people first want. A seating wall along one edge and a good table beats a fully built outdoor kitchen that gets used four times a year, and you can always add the kitchen in phase two once you know how you actually use the space.
Then choose the stone
Now it matters, and now you can choose it properly, because you know whether it will be in sun or shade and whether it needs to be cool underfoot.
Bring the samples home and leave them outside for a week. Look at them wet. Look at them at five in the afternoon. Stone in a showroom under fluorescent light tells you almost nothing about stone in your garden.
Budget in the right order
Base first, drainage second, area third, material fourth, built features last. If money runs short, shrink the patio rather than thinning the base. A smaller patio built properly is a good patio. A large one built on four inches of sand is a repair job with a date on it.