Driveways and patios in Wareham
Drives and patios built to the right level on low ground, with the crossing, the falls and the drainage sorted before a surface is chosen.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Where the water is going to go, and what level the finished job can sit at, come before any question about the surface on a town this low lying. We lay drives, front parking and patios throughout Wareham, and that is always where we start.
Most people ring us about one of three things. A front garden on one of the old streets that they want to park on, where the pavement, the kerb and the neighbours all get a say. A back garden patio that has sunk, gone green and now holds a puddle for two days after rain. Or a drive on one of the estates around the edge of town that went in with the house in about 1970 and has finally given up, cracked across the middle with the edges crumbling into the borders.
We come out, dig a hole, look at what is under the surface and take levels off the house before anything is priced. On this ground the levels matter as much as the materials. If the honest answer is a repair rather than a rebuild, that is what goes in the quote.
The work
Narrow streets, tight back gardens and 1970s estate drives
Turning a front garden into parking. On the terraced streets in the older part of town the house fronts almost straight onto the pavement and there is nothing at the back to park on, so the front garden is the only option. Nearly three in ten homes here are terraced, so it is a common conversation. The paving is the small part. Getting the crossing over the footway is the real job, because that is a highway application and the kerb work is done to their specification rather than ours. The bay behind it wants a proper edge restraint and a haunched kerb line so the blocks cannot spread sideways, and a border kept back off the wall so rain has somewhere to go other than the brickwork.
Back gardens you can only reach through the house. A good number of properties here have no side gate at all, and the way in is a shared alley or the hallway. That changes everything about how a patio is built and what it should cost. Every barrow of spoil and every pack of paving is carried, so we work in smaller lifts, board and sheet the route, and keep the muck away moving daily rather than heaping it in the garden. Where a grab lorry cannot get near it is a skip on the street with a permit, and the disposal goes on the quote as its own line.
Over half the housing in Wareham went up between 1945 and 1982, and the biggest single slice of it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those drives are almost all original concrete or thin tarmac laid straight onto whatever was there, and they fail the same way: a crack down the wheel tracks, rutting where the car turns in, and the surface breaking up at the garage threshold. If the slab below is sound, resin bound over it keeps the dig out of the equation. If it is moving, it comes up and the sub-base is rebuilt on a geotextile membrane, compacted in layers to a depth we set on site. Parts of the town sit in flood zones 2 and 3 with the Piddle a little over a hundred metres off, so where the water is sent is not a detail here. Out the back, Purbeck and other natural stone flags, porcelain on a full primed mortar bed, or block paving you can lift and relay: whatever goes down finishes clear of the damp proof course and falls away from the house, and where an old threshold sits too low we build in a channel drain rather than pretend. Steps get consistent risers. Repairs are worth doing on their own, and finding which single thing has failed is what the site visit is for.
How it runs
From your call to a written price
The itemised quote splits excavation, muck away, sub-base, edgings, surface and drainage onto separate lines so you can compare it. Dorset Council is the planning authority for Wareham, and with a great many listed frontages in the old streets it is worth checking listed building consent before altering anything at the front of a period property. Paving a front garden stays permitted development while the water stays on your land; more than five square metres of solid surfacing draining onto the road needs permission, which is the front garden rule in short. A dropped kerb across the footway is applied for separately, and it is the part that takes longest, so we start it the week the job is agreed.
Cost
What decides the price of a driveway
Access decides more of this than the paving does. A terrace fronting the pavement, a semi with a narrow side alley and a post-war house with a garage beside it are three different jobs before a machine has turned a wheel, and on the tight streets a skip and a permit can be the only way spoil leaves. How deep the dig has to go and how much muck goes away are the variables that move a price, not the colour of the block. Ask anyone quoting where they intend to put the surface water.
If it is urgent
A trip hazard, or a drive that floods
A lifted flag, a sunken bay at a doorway or a gully that has given up are phone calls, not form calls. We make it safe first and price the permanent work once the ground can be opened. If water has come up through the drive or stood against the back door, ring while it is there, because where it sat tells us more than a dry survey.
The one local thing
Levels first: much of Wareham is in a mapped flood zone
Wareham sits low between its rivers, with the Piddle running within a couple of hundred metres of the built up area, and large parts of the town are inside flood zones 2 and 3 on the national maps. You can put your own postcode into the government flood service in a minute. What that means for a drive or a patio is simple and it is mostly about levels.
Every time you build up the ground outside a house you make the wall a little more exposed, and in a flood zone that is not a theoretical risk. So we take levels off the damp proof course before we design anything, keep the finished surface below it, and fall the water away from the building rather than towards it. Where an old back door already sits at ground level, the answer is a drainage channel across the threshold and a positive outfall, not another 50mm of build up.
The second thing it changes is the drainage design. Ground that is wet for much of the winter does not soak away on demand, and a soakaway dug in July in ground that looks fine can be sitting full of groundwater in January before a drop of your rainwater arrives. So it gets a percolation test at the depth it would actually sit, which is how Approved Document H expects it to be done, and it stays well clear of the foundations.
If the ground takes water, a permeable surface over an open graded sub-base holds the rain and lets it go slowly, which is the whole idea behind SuDS. If it does not, we say so and give the water somewhere to go instead, with the owner of the ditch or watercourse agreeing first. What it can never do is go into the foul drain or straight out onto the street.
Who you are dealing with
A local firm you can check
We cover Wareham town and the BH20 villages around it, out through Stoborough, Sandford and Ridge, about ten miles from us. 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.
Questions
Wareham questions we get asked
Our street is in flood zone 3. Does that block a drive?
It does not. Wareham falls within flood zones 2 and 3 with the Piddle running close by, but a driveway is not a building and needs no flood consent of its own. What it does need is a surface that adds nothing to the problem. We set the levels so water runs to the garden rather than the door, use a permeable build up where the ground allows it, and avoid forming a hollow at the threshold.
How do you drain a walled yard in the old town?
With a fall and a linear channel, because there is nowhere to soak into. Terraced homes are 29.5% of Wareham and the yards behind West Street tend to be small, enclosed and lower than the lane outside. The ground here is naturally wet, so infiltration in a confined yard is not realistic. The paving falls to a channel across the full width and pipes to the existing gully at the lowest corner.
There are listed buildings all around us. Does my patio matter?
What matters is what you fix to the building, not the slabs. Wareham has 196 listed entries, and if your own house is one of them then drilling for a handrail, cutting a channel into the wall or raising ground against it needs listed building consent from Dorset Council. If the listed property is next door, your paving is your own business. We look the entry up before quoting rather than afterwards.
What do you dig to check before pricing the job?
A trial hole, every time, because the ground around Wareham holds water. It shows the depth of the existing make up, whether there is a slab hiding under the tarmac, how far down the soft material goes, and how quickly water leaves the hole. On an estate drive from the 1960s and 1970s cohort that dig usually finds a thin base laid straight onto soil, which explains the ruts where the wheels sit.
Where do we park while the drive is being built?
On the street, with some planning first. Parking in Wareham town centre is tight and the streets off West Street are narrow, so we agree in advance where the van and the grab lorry stand and keep one side of the road clear. Material arrives in bags rather than loose tipped where the frontage is short. If your only route in is a shared rear lane, the neighbours get the dates before we start.
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Get a written price for your drive or patio
A free visit in Wareham, levels taken off the house, and an itemised quote with the dig, the sub-base and the drainage priced separately.