Driveways in Oakdale

Replacing a tired concrete drive. Many houses in Oakdale were given a concrete drive or two wheel strips when they were built or soon after. Most have cracked across, sunk at the joints, and let weed in along every crack.

A slab that is still flat and solid can sometimes take resin bound on top with little digging. One that rocks or has dropped comes out. The ground is excavated to a firm formation, a geotextile membrane goes down, and the sub-base is built up in compacted layers, deep enough for the ground and for the weight of the car.

Block paving. It suits an Oakdale semi well, because a block that settles over a service trench can be lifted and relaid without a patch showing. The edges need a kerb or edge restraint set in a concrete haunch, or they slowly creep out onto the lawn. Kiln dried sand is brushed into the joints and topped up after a few weeks. A permeable block with open joints over a free draining base keeps the rain on your own ground.

Resin bound, tarmac and concrete. Resin bound is porous and tidy on a flat frontage, but goes down in one pour over a sound, dry base. Tarmac lays quickly and copes with a car turning on it, which suits a short drive you have to swing into off a side street. Pattern imprinted concrete wears hard, but a repair always shows and water runs off it, so the fall and a channel drain are designed in from the start.

Parking on the front garden. Laying the surface takes days; getting the crossing over the pavement approved can take longer. A new or wider dropped kerb is an application to BCP Council as highway authority, who rebuild or specify the footway. The lawn, roots and topsoil are dug out, the spoil leaves by grab lorry or skip, and the finished drive sits below the damp proof course, with the old front wall and piers rebuilt to suit if they have to move.

Side drives to a garage. On Oakdale bungalows especially, the drive often runs past the side of the house between the wall and the boundary. It is narrow, it takes the roof water from that side, and the gully at the bottom is often blocked. We widen what the boundary allows, fall it away from the house and give it a channel drain with a proper outfall.

Two drives side by side. On a pair of thirties semis in Oakdale the two front gardens meet at a low wall or a strip of lawn, and the new drive has to finish level with next door's path without pushing water onto it. We set the fall towards your own border or a channel drain, rebuild the dividing wall or pier if the digger has to take it out, and leave a clean edge where the two surfaces meet. If your neighbour wants a drive too, laying both at once saves a second dig along the boundary.

Repairs. A sunken bay of blocks, ruts in the wheel tracks, a kerb that has lifted, a puddle by the garage door or oil staining. Many of those are a day or two, and we tell you so instead of quoting a whole new drive.

No rate per square metre, because what is under it decides more of the cost than what goes on top.

Getting to it. A bungalow with a long side drive to a rear garage, a semi with a short open frontage and no side access, and a detached house set back on a main road run quite differently before a machine arrives. Everything arrives and everything leaves by the same route. A drive you can back a lorry onto is cheaper to build than one where every barrow goes through a side gate.

The sub base. The part you never see is the part that decides whether the surface is still flat in ten years. Ground conditions, how deep it has to be dug and how much muck goes away are the real variables.

Water, and where it is allowed to go. Surface water has to be dealt with on the property rather than run into the road, which means a permeable surface or somewhere for it to soak away. That is a design decision with a cost, not an afterthought.

Comparing quotes? Ask how deep the dig is and what sub base is going in, where the surface water is going, whether the edgings are haunched, and who takes the spoil away.

We lay drives across Oakdale and Stanley Green, from Wimborne Road and Darby's Lane out to the Canford Heath side, in BH15, from our base in Boscombe, about six miles east. BCP Council is both the planning and the highway authority.

You are dealing with Bournemouth Roofing & Building, the trading name of Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free. Before you book a visit in Oakdale, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Oakdale 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.