How do I take up an old patio and get rid of the slabs?

The hard part of taking up a patio is not breaking it, it is moving it. A 600mm concrete slab weighs a great deal, and a modest patio contains several tonnes of them. Everything below is aimed at handling that weight as few times as possible, and at not paying to dispose of material you can use.

Safety

What you'll need

• Two bolsters or slab lifters
• Sledgehammer
• Wheelbarrow, and a sack truck or slab trolley
• Gloves, boots and eye protection
• Breaker, hired, for a bedded or concreted patio (optional)
• Spade and mattock
• Skip, grab lorry or bags

Step by step

1. Decide what the material is going to become before you start.If you are relaying a patio, building a shed base or laying a drive, broken concrete is exactly what you need as hardcore. Crushing it in place and using it saves both the skip and the delivery. That decision changes how you break it up.
2. Check for services and for what is underneath.Old patios frequently sit over gullies, inspection chamber covers, cables to outside lights and buried water pipes. Look for covers, and use a detector along the wall line and any obvious run.
3. Start at a free edge.Work a bolster into the joint at a corner and lever the first slab up. Once one is out, every other slab has somewhere to move into and the job gets much faster.
4. Keep whole any slabs worth keeping.Sound slabs have real value — for a shed base, a path, a compost bay or on a local selling site. Lift those first and stack them on edge, not flat, where they will not be walked into.
5. Break the rest in place.A sledgehammer on a bedded slab, or a hired breaker on anything laid on a full mortar bed or a concrete base. Break to pieces you can pick up one-handed. This is far less work overall than carrying whole slabs and it makes the barrow runs manageable.
6. Barrow on a planked run.Scaffold boards or ply across a lawn from the patio to the skip. It saves the grass and, more importantly, it makes a loaded barrow controllable. A wheelbarrow of broken concrete on soft ground is how people hurt their backs.
7. Deal with the bedding and sub-base separately.Old mortar and sand come out with a spade and are the dirtiest, heaviest part of the job. Sound compacted sub-base can often stay — test it and reuse it under the new surface rather than digging it out and buying it again.
8. Choose the disposal route by volume.A few slabs: the household recycling centre, checking first whether they take rubble and whether there is a limit. A patio: a skip, or hardcore-only bags which are cheaper per tonne because clean rubble is a recyclable material. A large area with access: a grab lorry, which is often the cheapest of all if the material can be heaped where the arm can reach.
9. Keep the rubble clean.A skip of clean brick, concrete and stone is charged at a lower rate than mixed waste at most operators. Do not throw timber, plastic or turf into a hardcore skip.

Tips

• Hire a slab trolley or a set of slab lifters if you are keeping whole slabs. They turn a two-person carry into a one-person push.
• Break slabs face down where you can. It keeps the good face intact if you are keeping any and reduces flying fragments.
• Do the job over two or three sessions rather than one. Lifting several tonnes of concrete in a day is how weekend projects end in an injury.
• Offer sound slabs free locally before ordering a skip. They usually go within a day and each one is weight you do not pay to move.
• If the patio is against the house, this is the moment to check the ground level against the damp proof course and correct it before the new surface goes down.

Common mistakes

• Carrying whole slabs to the skip — It is the heaviest, most awkward and most dangerous way to do it, and it is entirely avoidable. Break first, carry second.
• Paying to dispose of usable hardcore — Broken concrete is a good sub-base material. If anything is being built on the site afterwards, keeping it saves both a disposal charge and a delivery charge.
• Digging out sound sub-base — A compacted sub-base is expensive to buy and to compact. Test it — if it is firm, angular and at a suitable level, build on it.
• Overloading a skip — Rubble is dense. A builder's skip filled with concrete can exceed its permitted weight before it looks full, and it will be refused or surcharged. Ask the operator about a rubble skip specifically.

Questions people ask