Driveways in Everton
Block paving, resin bound, tarmac and stone patios across Everton, Hordle and the SO41 villages. Free site visit, free written itemised quote.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
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On an Everton bungalow the drive is not just parking. It is the path to the front door, so before we talk about materials we look at how it walks: whether it is level, whether it drains away from the house, and whether the surface stays gripped when it is wet.
A drive in Everton needs repair or replacing once cracked concrete, silted block paving or a settled patio start holding water. A concrete drive that came with the house and has now cracked across the bays and dipped where the car has stood in the same spot for years. A block paved frontage laid in the nineties that has silted up, gone green in the shade and dished by the garage doors. Or a patio at the back that has settled just enough to hold a sheet of water outside the sliding doors every time it rains.
The one that worries people most is none of those. It is the lip: the inch or two of trip that appears between the drive and the path, or the path and the step, once the ground has moved. That is worth ringing about on its own. The free site visit is a level, a spade and a look under a lifted block, and you get told there and then whether it is a re-lay, a new sub-base or a full dig out, then the same thing in writing.
The work
What Everton frontages and drives usually need
Concrete drives from the estate years. Half the housing here went up between 1945 and 1982, and a great many of those bungalows were built with a plain concrete drive running to a garage at the side.
Decades of winters later the bays have cracked, the joints have opened, the surface is staining and there is a dip where the wheels sit. You cannot level concrete by putting something on top of it, so it is broken out, the spoil goes away by grab lorry, and we dig to a firm formation and rebuild: geotextile membrane, sub-base laid and compacted in layers, then whatever surface you have chosen.
Most of the block drives around Everton are not worn out at all. The jointing sand has washed out, weeds have taken the open joints, the edge restraint has been nudged out of line by a wheel and the whole frontage has dished. We lift and stack the blocks, put the base and the falls right, re-lay on a screeded sand bed and re-sand with kiln dried sand vibrated in, replacing only the blocks that have actually broken. It is the cheapest good outcome on this kind of drive.
Wide frontages made to work. Bungalows are common here and the plots tend to be broad and shallow, so most of the front garden is already hard surface or wants to be. That means a turning area you can leave forwards from, a second standing beside the first, and a border kept as planting rather than paving so the whole frontage is not one sheet of block. New edging is haunched in concrete, and where a vehicle will cross a kerb line that is a dropped kerb application to Hampshire County Council before anything is laid.
Riven natural stone, porcelain or sawn slabs go on a full mortar bed, with a fall running away from the house, the joints pointed properly and the finished level kept two courses clear of the damp proof course. On a bungalow the floor sits low, so this is the detail that matters most: get it wrong and you have made a shelf for water beside the wall. Where the level cannot drop, a channel drain along the threshold takes it instead. Two and a half kilometres from the sea a surface stays damp between showers, so texture on the path to the door matters as much as the colour of it.
How it runs
Laying a new drive, from the first dig to the last sweep
Thomas measures up, takes levels, and looks at which way the drive falls and where the rain goes now. The written quote breaks down the excavation, the muck away, the compacted sub base, edgings, the new surface and the drainage. One company covers it from dig to finish.
Most Everton houses have a front garden with space for a small digger, and a grab lorry can load from the road. Before we start, we agree where the grab lorry or skip goes and how you get your car out while the drive is up. The sub base goes down in layers, each one compacted, the edgings are set in concrete haunching, and the surface goes on last. Mud is kept off the road, and the pavement is swept each evening. If we dig up an old tank, soft ground or a broken drain, we send a photo and a price and wait for your go-ahead.
Paving round a house is usually permitted development. The catch is the front garden: more than five square metres of hard surface that water cannot soak through needs planning permission unless it drains to a soakable area on your own land. The Planning Portal guidance on paving a front garden sets it out. There is no conservation area over Everton, and New Forest District Council decides anything that does need permission.
Cost
Depth, drainage and the dig behind a driveway price
Driveways in Everton have no honest rate per square metre, because what lies under a drive decides more of the price than what you see on top.
The layout. A bungalow with a straight run to the garage, a detached house set back behind a turning circle, and a semi sharing a drive where the neighbour still needs to get out each need a different plan.
Digging out. How deep we go depends on the ground and what will park on it. Old concrete, tarmac or buried hardcore adds to the spoil, and each lorry load is priced.
The clay. The ground around Everton is clay that holds water and moves with the seasons. A soakaway often fails in clay, so the answer may be permeable block paving, a channel drain running to a proper outfall, or a planted strip to take the run-off. Each is a design choice with a cost, and it keeps you inside the front garden rule.
Edges. Edgings set in concrete haunching stop the blocks spreading. Cheaper, unhaunched edgings fail sooner.
Finish. Block paving, porous resin bound and gravel in a grid are each priced differently.
Ask any other quote what depth and what sub base they will lay, whether the edgings are haunched, where the water goes, and who takes the spoil.
If it is urgent
A lifted block, a sunken bay or water at the garage
Ring rather than use the form. A lifted block by the front door or a bay that has sunk is a trip hazard, and a drive that now slopes water back towards the garage or the house wall will cause damp.
Put a cone or a pot over a trip hazard and keep the car off a sunken patch. On the first visit we relay the worst blocks, or clear a blocked channel drain, so it is safe, and then look at why the base has failed. Planned driveway work is carried out Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. Should the call ring out, we phone back as soon as we can.
Worth knowing
Bungalow country, and what that changes about a drive
Everton is bungalow country, and that changes the brief more than the postcode does. In a house the front path and the parking are two separate things. In a bungalow they are usually the same surface, walked several times a day, often by somebody carrying shopping in one hand or using a stick in the other.
So we design the frontage as an approach and not just a hardstanding: a fall of around one in sixty so water runs off without you feeling the slope underfoot, no change of level between the drive and the path, and no decorative kerb across the walking line. Surface choice follows from that. Sawn smooth porcelain looks superb and is slippery in a wet winter, riven stone, textured block and resin bound all keep their grip, and the shaded north side of a bungalow is the stretch that greens over first, so that is where the grippier material earns its place.
The second thing is height. A bungalow floor sits close to the ground, so the drive, the path and the patio all end up near the damp proof course, and every re-lay is a chance to get that wrong. Laying a new surface over an old one raises the level by the thickness of everything you have added, which is how a perfectly good wall ends up with a damp band along the bottom of it. For the patio itself, see patios in Everton.
We take the old surface out rather than build on top of it, keep the finished level down where it should be, and put a threshold drain in where the geometry leaves no other option. Approved Document H is the standard behind that last part, and it matters here because a wide bungalow frontage sheds a lot of water for the size of the house.
Who you are dealing with
Driveways across Hordle parish, priced by the owner
Everton lies 10.8 miles from our base in Boscombe. We lay drives there and in Hordle, Tiptoe, Milford on Sea, Lymington and New Milton, and the council for planning and building control is New Forest District.
The business trades as Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, company number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. Thomas Hannen is the owner. He comes to look at your drive, checks the levels and prices it himself. A verified customer rated the firm 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The survey visit is free, and the written quote with each item set out costs nothing either. Before you book a visit in Everton, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Everton?
Most repairs in Everton need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.
| Question | In Everton |
|---|---|
| Who decides | New Forest District Council is the planning authority for Everton. The National Park boundary runs close by, and the Park's property map shows which side an address falls. |
| Conservation area | None covers Everton, so a like-for-like repair is ordinary maintenance. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Everton. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Everton. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Everton
Everton has no conservation area. Is the paving our choice?
On looks, largely. There is no conservation area over Everton, and the fifteen listed entries, Efford House among them, only bite where a property is one of them or sits inside a curtilage. New Forest District is the planning authority here rather than the National Park, a distinction worth getting right on any application. For most houses that leaves the surface to you and turns the decision onto wear and drainage.
Four in ten homes here are bungalows. Does the frontage change?
It usually has more work to do. Everton has plenty of bungalows, and on one the frontage handles parking, turning and a level walk to a door sitting low. The fall has to be found over a short distance without pushing water at the threshold, so a drainage channel across the front often replaces the last of the slope. Turning space gets set out on paper before anything is dug or ordered.
We are close to the water. Does salt reach the drive?
It reaches the metal in it. Everton is about two and a half kilometres from the coast, and airborne salt corrodes fixings from the edge inwards while keeping surfaces damp between showers. So edgings, gate ironwork and channel gratings want galvanised or non ferrous fixings, and the shaded seaward side of a terrace greens over faster, which makes a proper fall matter more than it would further inland.
Our concrete drive is as old as the bungalow. Break it out?
Look at what it is doing first. Much of Everton went up after the war, a lot of it in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and concrete of that age is normally thin, unreinforced and laid straight onto the ground. If it has cracked into pieces that rock underfoot, it comes out. If it is sound and only ugly, it can serve as part of the base under a new surface.
Can the drive and the path be priced separately?
They should be. The written quote splits a job into items, so the drive, the path to the front door, the drainage and any edging each stand on their own and one can be deferred without renegotiating the rest. It also separates our work from a council application. Thomas Hannen prices it after the visit, and neither the visit nor the quote costs you anything.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Everton
Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Everton, and the other trades we offer in Everton itself.
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Our other trades in Everton
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Get a written price for your Everton drive
A free site visit, a level run across the frontage, and an itemised written quote with the method on it.