You have a pretty short drive iirc.
Mine is too narrow. Would like it widened - so it bumps up to the foundation of my hose - another 3 feet-ish on that side, and maybe 2 feet on the opposite side. I’ll take a measure in a moment
I want to go the other way, sort of. I want a driveway that’s two tracks like the pic below. One, I feel like we have too much hard surface so it’s a nice aesthetic. Two, it was common to have done it this way when my house was built (1912).
But first, I have to get through a bath, a new porch, and rebuilding windows. It’ll be a couple or three years.
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Consider permeable pavers for the tire paths (crosshatch patterns for instance) for maximum absorption. If I ever have to replace the driveway, this is what I will do. I would like to collect the rainwater that comes off my driveway, but it is just about the lowest level of my lot.
That’s a great idea. I like the look and we get a lot of runoff, so more absorption would be welcome. I’d need to see how much more it costs, we have about 120’ of drive plus a parking area.
We still have not replaced our driveway, which badly needs it. It’s a lot of driveway.
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Any recommendations for material? Currently we have concrete with some kind of stone in the concrete. And it’s on a hill (house higher than road).
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Is there a ballpark guideline for cost? Like $X / sqft for blacktop vs $Y for cement vs $Z for concrete?
Do you recommend pavers for a whole driveway?
My concern with pavers is weeds. I would love to not have to weed the driveway. It seems like pavers would require more weeding than concrete.
Are there permeable options not prone to getting weedy?
I realize everything will sprout weeds given enough time, but I’m going for minimal weeds for maximum time.
If you like a paver kind of look but don’t want to deal with weeds, you could consider stamped concrete. It’s going to be more expensive than regular concrete, which in turn is more expensive than asphalt.
I’m not sure if I have a preference on the look of pavers. I’d be worried stamped concrete might break in more places than regular and require more weeding. Really looking to avoid weeding the driveway.
If maintenance is a key concern, probably not gonna do much better than concrete. Very little weeding, no mowing, and if it’s poured right it’ll last decades. Fill in cracks with the crack sealant stuff every few years.
I don’t have experience with pavers and haven’t done serious research. Per square foot they seem to be more expensive, and at least this source has them as less durable (but they also think a driveway only lasts 20-30 years!) Weeds would be an issue if you care about that sort of thing, much like in a yard. As far as breaking in more places, if they do, it’s just more space for grass, and not as visually surprising as grass in the cracks of a solid asphalt/concrete driveway.
As far as yard stuff goes, I have gone full hippie. No watering, no fertilizer, cut no more frequently than two weeks. I pull one type of weed in the grassy area, and only use herbicide on poison ivy. I lost a tree in the front, and a wild blackberry volunteered in the mulched area, so I left it. This is the second year for it and I might get a pint of berries. A good mass of white clover in the front too. Here is the side of the house with some weeds. Been like this for a few years now. I just wait until they have seeded and then cut them down. Picture doesn’t quite do the density of the blue justice. Earlier in the spring the white flowers on the left were dominant and about as dense in the front half of the pictured area. Virtually no effort on my part.
Oh, I guess there is a fertilizer exception. After I lost the tree in the front, I had a tree service treat the other maple. They do a pressure injection of fertilizer into the soil (mini-fracking!) to about 6 inches of depth. I trim the branches that come too low, as well as the hollies, boxwoods, chaste tree, and azaleas.
I don’t think that you can get a cement driveway. Cement is always reinforced with rebar and stone, thus becoming concrete.
These are 2006 prices, but when I faced the decision, my quotes were in the $3.75/sq ft for asphalt and $5.25/ sq ft for concrete, so like a 40% bump for concrete from asphalt. Those prices included the break-up and haul away of the disaster that was the old asphalt driveway.
The lifespan of concrete is longer than asphalt.
Not all driveways are poured with rebar, but the addition of (water,) sand(,) and aggregate to cement (the binging agent) creates concrete. Sometimes a pour is reinforced with steel mesh (which is like rebar, but much thinner and preformed into 2D sheets). The issue is water penetration in cracked concrete leads to rusting rebar, which expands and further cracks the concrete. If the extra strength isn’t needed, then I think that the lack of steel in the concrete may make it more durable. More research would be necessary, including local codes and your particular layout.
This seems like a regional thing, too. In Chicago you have to prepare the concrete for 100*+ sunshine and -30* winter lows, so maybe concrete is reinforced to a greater degree than it is say, south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Hmmm, well our driveway has a decorative stone mixed into the concrete and our neighbor’s doesn’t. But maybe that’s just two different kinds of concrete.
Most of the country will get 100 degrees plus… heck Fairbanks, Alaska will get to 100 degrees in the summer.
Fewer places will get to 30 below, but below zero is common most places too. Certainly where I live neither sub-zero nor above 100 is rare. I don’t know about 30 below, even in Chicago where the record low is 25 below.
Still, that’s lower than a lot of places, I will grant you.
If you want a hard smooth surface that’s safe to drive 60mph on, concrete has a longer lifespan – and is widely used on roads where freezing/thawing aren’t a problem. (Concrete is not only more expensive to lay down, it’s also more expensive to repair/replace, so it often isn’t cost effective where ice will break it up.) But all a driveway really needs to do is provide a hard enough surface that your car doesn’t sink into mud. Gravel intermixed with weeds can last forever, with minimal maintenance, in some areas. My asphalt driveway is more than 60 years old. And yeah, there are places where there are small cracks and weeds, but just casually pulling the weeds up in the spring has kept it at pretty much the same level of decrepit for a couple decades, now. And honestly, it works fine.
Yeah, that was two different esthetic choices by whoever decided what to make the driveway of. Concrete is nice in that you can gussie it up with different colorful (or sparkly) aggregates.
There is the old school ‘oil and stone’ driveway that is (iirc) asphalt with some nicer looking stone pressed into it. I don’t see many and I don’t know how they hold up, guessing similar to black top.
I mostly recall this from seeing them used on old episodes of This Old House.
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I just Googled this. It looks a lot nicer than blacktop. I wonder how the cost & maintenance compares to blacktop & concrete.
Has to be more maintenance than blacktop right, just because in addition to the problems with the asphalt, the stone on top could come loose.
I’d be curious to see cost. Obviously it would cost more than asphalt alone, but I’d wager it costs less than concrete.
But I’m trying to avoid actually doing the research since a new driveway won’t be in my budget any time soon.
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Yeah, I was sort of guessing it might be in between in terms of cost and maybe maintenance too.
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