Ground-level terrace, any experiences in planning the slope?

But you don't dig down to frost-free depth for that, or what kind of monster wheelbarrows do you have?

Since when do you pave down to frost-free depth, especially with a terrace that won't bear any significant load? The nice thing about paving is that it's flexible and doesn't have any problems if one stone shifts a millimeter higher in winter on the left side than on the right. It's different when you glue terrace slabs in a screed bed. But that's no longer paving. And even the modern monster sizes of terrace slabs are not the same as working with paving stones in the range of 10x20 to 20x30. You can vibrate paving stones, but not 3cm slabs measuring 90x90cm.

I still maintain that a wooden terrace is easier to do yourself. At least if you haven’t done either before.

I only have experience with paving (normal-size clinker) and find that you’re making things look more complicated here than they are. We leveled the terrace widthwise in two steps (who as a layman has a 5m straightedge?), used 3m roof battens as screed rails, and pieced together a little piece at the bottom. But 5m roof battens do exist, we just didn’t want to buy any specifically. Is a wooden terrace really easier? Maybe. At the time it didn’t seem so to me when I looked into it. And ultimately you can't avoid paving if you also want to do paths and driveways yourself.

Since when do you pave down to frost-free depth, and that on a terrace without significant load? The nice thing about paving is that it’s flexible and doesn’t have problems if one stone shifts a millimeter higher in winter than the stone next to it.

It would be nice if it stayed within +/- a millimeter. But if you don’t build on frost-free ground, sooner or later there will be more than a millimeter of settling, depending on the soil beneath the frost protection. This is not primarily related to the load. If water that cannot drain quickly freezes, a cavity forms in the substructure. And sooner or later that will always settle. Sure, a paved terrace doesn’t become unusable right away, but it doesn’t look very nice either. If you have Märkisch sand soil, that doesn’t matter because it's permeable. But if not, you have a choice, either build on frost-free ground, or excavate even more area than just the actual paved surface and create a slope, or drain the substructure. I don’t know which is the most complicated.

I only have experience with paving (standard-format bricks) and think you are making things look more complicated here than they really are.

I don’t want to make things more complicated than they are, I just claim that (for the layman) a stone terrace is more difficult and harder to build than a wooden terrace. For example, I’m of the opinion that you can manage a wooden terrace on your own, which I don’t really see for a stone terrace.

I did not talk about the stone formats at all, only about the substructure. And let’s be honest, terraces nowadays are rarely paved with bricks but rather with 50x50x4,x concrete slabs. That is still paving, you do lay those in a gravel bed for sure. We paved the driveway with 20x30x8, and that is already much more cumbersome than the 20x10 standard stones. You can no longer grasp them with one hand and set them practically in stereo, you have to grasp the stone with both hands and then set it down. Any subsequent alignment is more difficult, because the stone weighs about 9 instead of 4 kg. The terrace slabs are thinner, so not much heavier, but the format is even more unwieldy.

We leveled the terrace in width in two steps (who as a layman has a 5m screed board? For screed guides we used 3m batten strips and spliced a small piece at the bottom.

Well, that was exactly my argument. As a layman you don’t have that, so you splice, and then you either have more effort when setting stones (because you’re no longer exactly along the desired slope at the spliced "joint"), or you have to level multiple times with overlaps. Two beam ends on point foundations are simply much easier to bring into the desired slope, you can’t seriously deny that?

Whether a wooden terrace is really lighter? Maybe.

It didn’t seem so to me at the time when I dealt with the subject.

Strange, to me it already seemed much more complicated in pure theory to build a stone terrace. Yes, I don’t know 100% either. But I have paved, so I know what kind of effort and hard work that is. And I have done the individual work steps for a wooden terrace in various projects (fence and attic), so I think I can estimate that well. Who knows, maybe during the project I will discover totally new problems that I can’t anticipate today. I will report back then (as I said, unfortunately not before next year).

And ultimately you don’t get around paving anyway if you also want to do paths and driveway yourself.

That’s rather a reason for me to have some variety; after the driveway, I had no desire to set even one edging stone or screed a gravel bed. But maybe I’m just a softy.

We have built 2 terraces with WPC solid boards (3/4 wood content) closed deck, base made of grass grid stones, padded and aligned with 3, 5, and 8mm pads and screwed. The first terrace has now been in place for longer than 10 years and is still great to walk barefoot and crawl on, cleaned with a pressure washer annually and that’s it.

Do you have one? If yes, please show a photo. I would still accept hollow chamber WPC decking but wood you have to sand and oil at some point, etc.

If you lay this WPC stuff facing south, I wish you good luck, that stuff can't handle sun and becomes brittle :-(

I don't want to turn this into a big wood vs. stone discussion now, so I'll just briefly address the topic of frost resistance. I haven't found anything in any book that suggests founding a pavement down to frost-resistant depth. There you find a base layer of 15-30cm of crushed stone (depending on load and soil) and, in very impermeable soils, sometimes as an option an additional 10-20cm of drainage gravel. Even among the landscapers of the neighbors, I haven't seen anything approaching the 80+cm that we would need here for frost-resistant depth.

Yes, you can do it that way, but then you have to provide drainage (=drainage gravel, soil underneath also with a slope, away from the planned terrace). I don’t want to deny that this is often not done in practice. That’s why stone terraces often don’t look so great after 10 years. I just wanted to compare at least apples to apples. And not rotten meat with dried plums. But yes, we can end the discussion now. Especially since the OP has already bought porcelain stoneware and thus neither option is actually applicable for him... (I just read that again now...) Sorry about that!