3cm Flamed Granite Paving Price per Square Meter: Which Square Are You Pricing?
A 3cm flamed granite paving price per square meter is four costs stacked on one figure: slab, flame texturing, cut-to-size and sealing with packing. Ask for the four lines separately, and settle the area basis before the number — net paved area, cutting area or delivered area. At 2.7 t/m³ a 3cm slab runs 81 kg per m², and our 346 m² per 20ft loading figure works back to a container that hits payload first.
What is actually inside a 3cm flamed paving price per square meter?
Four lines, and you should ask for them separately. Slab cost follows block grade and yield; flame texturing follows how many pieces pass the burner; cut-to-size follows the layout and the saw kerf; sealing and packing follow how many faces are coated and how the pallets are built. The slab line has to trace back to two numbers: which quarry face the batch came from, and how many square meters of raw slab one square meter of finished paving takes. Put both on the quotation and you can hold a second supplier to the same face; a quote that gives only a rate leaves you comparing luck, not stone. Quoted as one lump, you cannot see which line was trimmed. Before the figure, agree what a square meter means. A paving job carries three at once: net paved area on the drawing, cutting area, and delivered area. When they fail to reconcile, the gap is sitting in the borders and edge trim. The third row is not packing converted into area — packing adds weight and cost, never area; delivered area counts pieces multiplied by nominal size.
| Area basis | How it is measured | Who carries the waste | One question to ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net paved area | Measured after laying; tree pits, covers, planters deducted | Supplier — waste sits in the rate | Does the rate include edge trim and borders? |
| Cutting area | Calculated from the layout drawing, in raw slab | Buyer | What share of the layout is offcut? |
| Delivered area (packing-list area) | Pieces on the packing list × nominal area per piece, waste included | Buyer | Do the piece counts match the layout? |
2cm, 3cm or 5cm — where does the money actually change per square meter?
Thickness changes weight first, container payload second, and only then the freight each square meter carries. At 2.7 t/m³: 20mm is 54 kg/m², 30mm is 81 kg/m², 50mm is 135 kg/m². Our own record of 346 m² of 30mm per 20ft container works back to roughly 28 tonnes, so the box hits payload, not volume. On that same payload, 20mm fits about 500 m² and 50mm about 200 m²; one container's freight divided over that area moves by about two and a half times between 2cm and 5cm. So the first two questions are always: quoted at what thickness, and how many square meters in the container. Match thickness to duty as well: 3cm over a rigid base is the common pedestrian build-up, vehicle areas go thicker, and a thin paver on a vehicle base asks more of the base rather than less of the stone. Grade mainly changes the slab line: Sesame Grey G602, Sesame Black G654 and Maple Red G562 (national standard G4562) run the same process, but hardness differs, so burner passes and yield shift — flame and cutting still have to be quoted per grade, never copied from another stone.
| Thickness | Weight kg/m² | m² per 20ft at ~28 t | Freight index per m² (30mm = 100) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20mm | 54 | 518 | 67 |
| 30mm | 81 | 346 | 100 |
| 50mm | 135 | 207 | 167 |
Is the flame finish applied before cut-to-size, or after?
After. Paving is flamed at final size, not flamed as a big slab and then cut. The reason is the edge: a sawn edge is paler and carries no flame texture, so every joint reads as a pale line — particularly visible on light tones such as light grey and Sesame White. Flamed at size, face and four edges match, and the joint reads as one line instead of two. The price is in handling. At 600×300 a square meter holds 5.56 pieces; at 600×600 it holds 2.78. Same area, twice the pieces: twice the jigging, turning and burner passes, so a smaller module carries a higher rate for identical stone and identical finish. A quote that omits the module size is not comparable. One sequencing point: flame texturing alters the top few millimetres, so dimensional tolerance has to be cut before burning — trim an edge afterwards and you expose fresh, untextured stone.
How many pieces make a square meter, and who pays for the offcut?
600×300 is 0.18 m², so 5.56 pieces per m²; 600×600 is 0.36 m², 2.78 pieces; 400×400 is 0.16 m², 6.25 pieces. Those numbers drive the layout. A 600-wide slab split into two 300s loses the kerf between them, so the raw slab cannot be ordered as a clean 600. Who carries the waste follows the area basis: on net paved area the supplier carries it and your job is to keep the layout from being shredded into small pieces; on cutting area you carry it, and 45° laying, curved borders, tree-pit rings and cover cut-outs push it up — all of which are priced per piece or per linear metre, never folded into the square-meter rate. One question separates a real layout from a guess: in this layout, what share is offcut, and which area does it sit in?
How do I measure the square meters on arrival so both sides agree?
Measure net paved area after laying, and settle on the basis written into the contract — keep the two steps apart. Pull ten pieces and measure length, width and thickness; 3cm goes against the stated tolerance, and a short thickness is charged back by volume, not by piece. Log broken pieces separately rather than letting them net off against area, because only a per-piece claim recovers the freight. Four lines belong on the quotation: area basis; thickness with tolerance; finish, including whether edges are flamed and whether sealing is five-face or six-face; packing and the loading basis. The last one is the easiest to skip: do not multiply by 346 m² as if it were a quantity. It is a ruler, not an order — it measures the ceiling a 20ft box reaches with 30mm slab stacked face to face, and your cut-to-size order needs dunnage and expansion gaps and will not get there. Build freight on the per-container gross weight your supplier quotes, or on the square metres actually loaded; either beats multiplying 346 by a rate. We run 20 large saws and 500,000 m² a year in Cenxi, 100 m² minimum, five days on standard slab; cut-to-size flamed work is scheduled separately.