Walkways & Steps

The most-used hardscape on the property

Nobody photographs the front walk. Everybody uses it — every day, often in the dark, often in winter, often with their hands full. A walk or a set of steps that's a little bit off isn't a cosmetic problem. It's a trip and a fall.

So we build these to numbers, not to feel.

Steps: consistent rise is the whole thing

Your body learns a stair on the first step. It swings the next foot to the height it just measured. When one riser in a flight is different from the others, the foot lands where there's no step — or hits a step that shouldn't be there yet. That's the mechanism of virtually every stair fall.

Which is why the code is written the way it is:

• Risers within a flight must be uniform — the residential code allows only a small tolerance between the tallest and shortest riser in a flight (⅜ inch). Not "close enough." Uniform.
• Treads must be uniform too, to the same tolerance.
• Residential stairs have a maximum riser height and a minimum tread depth, and any set of steps attached to the house or serving as an exit is code-governed. We build to the code in force in your jurisdiction.

For landscape steps out in the yard — moving you down a grade, not serving a doorway — the geometry is more forgiving and it should be more generous, not less. A comfortable outdoor step is a low rise with a deep tread: something in the neighborhood of a 6-inch rise with a 14-to-18-inch tread walks beautifully on a slope, because outdoors your stride is longer and your eyes are up.

A useful check: two risers plus one tread should land around 25 to 27 inches. A stair that violates that feels wrong even when every individual number is legal.

The other thing: every tread gets pitched to drain — a slight fall forward, roughly ⅛ to ¼ inch per foot. A dead-level tread holds water. Water on a tread in January is ice on a tread in January.

Steps get built, not stacked

Whether they're block, natural stone slabs, or poured:

• The bottom step sits on a compacted aggregate pad, same as a wall — because that's what it is. The bottom step of every failing stair in Colorado is the one that settled.
• Each course is compacted and backfilled behind as it goes, in lifts. A stair with loose fill behind it is a stair that will lean.
• If there's soil retained beside the steps, the cheek walls get the same drainage zone and drain rock a retaining wall gets.
• Natural stone slab steps get bedded so they don't rock. One rocking slab step is a lawsuit.
• Handrails. Once a flight hits the riser count your code requires, it needs a graspable handrail. We'll tell you when you're there.

Walkways

Width matters more than people think. A 3-foot walk is a single-file walk. Four feet lets two people walk side by side and lets you get a wheelbarrow, a stroller, or a snow shovel down it without dancing. On a primary front walk, four feet is the number that makes a house feel right.

Base is the same story as a patio. Compacted CDOT Class 6, placed and compacted in lifts of 3 to 4 inches, separation fabric over clay subgrade, one inch of bedding, and — critically — the base extends past the edge of the walk. A narrow strip of pavement has a lot of edge relative to its area, which means walks fail at the edges more than patios do.

Edge restraint is non-negotiable on a walk. Both edges, the full length. Nothing is holding the field but the restraint, and a walk with free edges spreads, opens its joints, and goes wavy. If you've seen a paver walk with grass creeping into wide joints and pavers sitting at little angles — that's a missing or failed restraint.

Slope: cross-fall, not just fall. A walk gets a slight cross-slope (about ¼ inch per foot) so water sheets off the side rather than running down the walk and pooling at the low end — which is usually your front door or the bottom of the steps. Getting this wrong is how you build an ice rink at the exact spot everyone has to stand.

Winter

Everything we build here is built assuming it will be shoveled, and assuming somebody will eventually throw the wrong de-icer at it.

• No lips, no proud pavers, nothing for a shovel to catch.
• Positive drainage everywhere — the whole point is that meltwater leaves before it refreezes.
• Skip chloride de-icers on new concrete for the first winter, and go light after that. Sand adds traction and doesn't attack the surface.

Need a walk, a stair, or both? Get an estimate — we'll shoot the grade and give you a real number. Or read what good base prep actually looks like first, so you know what to hold us to.