Craft

The Height at the Back Door Decides the Whole Patio

Four things set the finished level at the wall, and none of them are negotiable once the surface is down. Here is what decides it, and the trade that catches people out.

Updated September 2026 · Kenosha Hardscaping

Where a patio meets the house, the finished level is decided by four things at once: the door sill you already have, the point where your siding or masonry stops, the direction water has to travel to get away from the wall, and the rules that apply to your particular parcel. That line is also the only dimension on the whole project you cannot revisit cheaply. Everything else on a patio can be adjusted, extended, softened or reworked years later. The height at the back door cannot, because the entire surface is measured down and out from it. Here is how we read it on a Kenosha County walk-through, and why it comes up before anyone mentions base depth.

Why this one line cannot be moved later

Think about what depends on it. The fall of the whole field is measured from the wall outward. The depth of the excavation is dug to suit it. Any step, landing or wall on the far side is set to land where that fall arrives. Change the level at the house and none of the rest of it works any more.

That is why lifting a finished patio at the wall is not a repair, it is a rebuild. You are not resetting a few units near the door. You are re-cutting the grade across the entire surface so the water still leaves in the same direction, which means the whole field comes up. Owners who assume a patio can be nudged upward later are usually thinking of it as a floor, and it is not a floor. It is a shaped ground surface with one fixed edge.

The four things that set it

None of these are preferences. They arrive at the site already decided, and the job is to read them accurately rather than to argue with them.

What sets the finished level at the house wall

Input	What it decides	Where the answer comes from
The existing door sill	Where the surface lands relative to the threshold you step over	Measured at the door, with it open
Where siding or masonry stops	How much wall stays above the finished surface	Read on the wall itself, not from a plan
Where water has to go	Which way the whole field falls, and what it drains toward	Design stage, before any excavation
The rules for your parcel	Grade change, drainage and coverage questions	Your village or Kenosha County

Two of those are physical and two are not. The sill and the wall are things you can go and look at this afternoon. The water and the local rules are things somebody has to think about in advance, and they are the two that get skipped.

The trade that catches people out

Here is the request we hear most often. The back door has an awkward drop, somebody has tripped on it, and the obvious fix is to bring the patio up so the step disappears. It sounds like a small ask. It is the single most expensive idea on this page.

Raising the surface at the wall does not just remove a step. It changes where the ground sits against the house, and a house wall is built for the ground being at one height rather than another. Putting a paved surface higher than the wall was built to expect is not a landscaping decision that happens to touch the house, it is a decision about the house that happens to be made by a landscaper. Those are two very different things, and only one of them ends well.

So we do not make that call, and we would be careful with anyone who does. Whether a higher surface can be accommodated at the wall on your specific house is a question for the trades that build and inspect houses. If the answer comes back yes, the patio can be drawn to suit it. If it comes back no, you have lost nothing except an idea, and you have not learned it the hard way several winters later.

Water at the door is a bad argument to lose

The area right outside a back door is already the busiest square yard of drainage on most lots. A downspout often lands near it. Snow gets shovelled off the patio and piled at its edge, where it melts back toward whatever the ground slopes to. Ice comes off the roofline in the same spot every February.

That is a lot of water arriving in one place, on a schedule that has nothing to do with rain. If the surface falls the wrong way, all of it goes to the wall, and it goes there repeatedly through a Wisconsin freeze-thaw season rather than once. What does the damage is the process we lay out in why patios heave and crack here: water that cannot leave gets into the ground, freezes, and expands.

Getting the fall right at the wall is not a detail added at the end. It is a constraint on the level itself, which is why it belongs in the same conversation as the sill height rather than in a later one about drainage.

If there is going to be a step, design it

Sometimes the door is simply high, and the honest outcome is a step or a landing. That is not a failure. A generous landing at the door, set out as part of the layout, is a better piece of hardscaping than a flush surface achieved by pushing the level where it does not belong.

What makes a step read well is that it was drawn rather than discovered. It gets the same material as the rest of the patio, it is deep enough to stand on comfortably with a tray in your hands, it is lit, and it is not the first thing you meet coming out of the door in the dark. What makes a step read badly is that it turned up in the last week of the job because the numbers did not meet.

Settle it at the walk-through

Open the back door and stand in it with whoever is going to build the patio. Look at where the wall stops. Look at where water goes now in a hard rain, and where the snow gets pushed in January. That five-minute conversation sets the level, and the level sets everything else.

If you want the shape of the rest of the build, the patios page sets out how a Kenosha County backyard gets built from the subgrade upward, and the cost page covers what genuinely moves a quote without us inventing numbers. If any part of your plan changes the grade near the house, take it to the patio permit question early rather than late.