Ply Gem Driveway & Pavers Nationwide | Barrett & Sons Construction

Ply Gem Driveway & Pavers: The Los Angeles Owner’s Guide

If you have a Ply Gem paver driveway or walkway that’s shifting, cracking, or spreading at the edges, we can source the matching paver units or a compatible replacement and install them for you. A typical Ply Gem-compatible paver repair or replacement in Los Angeles runs $8260-$21240 for a full driveway, with smaller patch jobs falling below that. Most owners discover the problem the hard way: a paver sinks after a rainstorm, a section heaves from tree roots, or the sand joints wash out and weeds move in.

Call (877) 610-1318

We’re Barrett & Sons Construction, and we’ve been doing driveway and paver work in Los Angeles since 1998. We’re an independent contractor, not affiliated with Ply Gem, but we work with their paver lines regularly and know the sizing and compatibility quirks. The good news: in most cases you don’t need to tear out the whole driveway. The bad news: the longer a failed section sits, the more the base underneath erodes, and the repair grows.

Which Ply Gem Models This Applies To

Ply Gem’s paver line covers a few distinct product families, and getting the right match matters. Their concrete pavers are the most common in Los Angeles driveways: rectangular units, typically 4″x 8″ or 6″x 9″, in thicknesses from 60mm (about 2-3/8″) for pedestrian areas up to 80mm (about 3-1/8″) for vehicle traffic. If your driveway carries cars, the thinner pavers will crack under the weight. That’s the single most common mismatch we see. A homeowner patched a walkway paver into a driveway and wonders why it fractured within a year.

Ply Gem also makes permeable pavers with wider joints designed to let water flow through. Those joints are intentional. Filling them with regular sand defeats the purpose and leads to standing water on your driveway during Los Angeles winter rains. Here’s a compatibility gotcha worth knowing: Ply Gem paver colors are batch-specific. A “Charcoal” paver from 2019 will not perfectly match a “Charcoal” paver manufactured last year. Sun fading in Los Angeles makes that difference even more visible. If a perfect match matters, we’ll pull a sample from an inconspicuous area, like behind a gate or under a planter, and order to that. If you’d rather not wait, we stock quality aftermarket pavers in common Los Angeles sizes that read as a close match from street distance, and we’ll be upfront about where the color shift will show.

Signs Your Ply Gem Driveway & Pavers Is Failing

• Sunken or dipping sections. This usually means the compacted base underneath has eroded or settled, often due to poor drainage or a broken sprinkler line under the driveway. The paver isn’t the real problem; the base is. Replacing the paver alone won’t fix it.
• Pavers shifting or spreading at the edges. The edge restraint has failed. Without a solid edge to hold the field tight, pavers walk outward. You’ll see this first along the driveway edges in Los Angeles neighborhoods with clay-heavy soil that expands and contracts with moisture.
• Sand washing out of the joints after rain. The joint sand is doing the real structural work, holding each paver in place. When it washes away, pavers start grinding against each other and chipping.
• Weeds or ants colonizing the joints. That’s a sign the sand has thinned enough for roots to take hold. In Los Angeles, warm-season weeds will exploit a joint gap within a season. It starts cosmetic; it ends with pavers loosening.
• Hairline cracks across multiple pavers. That signals flex in the base or point loads from a heavy vehicle. If a section of your driveway regularly supports your truck or RV, 80mm units are the minimum we’ll recommend.

Replacement Cost & What’s Included

A full paver driveway replacement in Los Angeles typically ranges from $8260 to $21240, depending on square footage, paver thickness, access, and whether we’re rebuilding the base or just resurfacing. A partial repair or re-leveling of a sunken section usually runs lower, and we’ll give you a written line-item quote before any work begins. That’s how we’ve done it for 29 years.

Every paver job from Barrett & Sons includes removal and disposal of the failed section, base regrading and compaction, new or repaired edge restraints, paver installation, fresh joint sand, and a final walkthrough with you. We pull permits when the scope requires it, and the inspector signs off before we call it done. Our work carries the 90-Day Done Right Promise: if it’s not done right, Tom comes back and makes it right, one call.

DIY or Call Us?

For walkway paver repair, you can absolutely reset a few loose units yourself if the base is still solid. Pull the pavers, add a bit of bedding sand, reset them, sweep in fresh joint sand. That’s a Saturday project in Los Angeles with a trip to any hardware store. For a driveway that carries vehicle weight, we’d recommend you stop at the diagnosis stage. The danger isn’t the paver; it’s the base underneath. If a driveway section has sunk, the base has failed, and resetting the surface layer without rebuilding what’s below just postpones the problem by a season.

The other honest truth: paver work is heavy. A full pallet of 80mm pavers weighs over 3,000 pounds. Most homeowners don’t have a way to move that, and we don’t want you throwing out your back on a driveway that’ll still fail in eighteen months. If you’ve got a sunken section, shifting edges, or pavers that crack every time you park the truck there, call us at (877) 610-1318 and we’ll come look. There’s no trip charge inside Los Angeles County.

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