Driveways in Wool
Drives, garage aprons and patios in the village, rebuilt from the sub-base up rather than resurfaced over the old one.
The site visit is free and so is the written itemised quote. Thomas Hannen prices every job himself.
Last updated
The base under a Wool drive usually has to be rebuilt before anything new goes on top, and the surface itself is the part you are free to change. Most of them went down when the houses did, which for a lot of the village means the 1970s, so they are reaching the end together.
Drives of this age in Wool crack and rock, hold water at the door, or were laid out for one car. A concrete drive that has cracked across a bay and now rocks when a wheel goes over it. Water standing at a garage door or a front step after a downpour, on ground that was already slow to drain. And a household that has gone from one car to two, on a frontage that was laid out when one was the assumption.
What we do first is open a hole in the existing surface, check the depth and the state of the sub-base, and follow the fall of the ground from the house out to the boundary. Then we look at the practical side: how a machine gets in, where a lorry can stand, and whether there is anywhere for surface water to go. The quote comes back itemised, with the excavation, the muck away, the sub-base, the edgings, the surface and the drainage on their own lines.
The work
Estate drives, garage aprons and parking bays in Wool
Concrete laid in bays. This is the classic Wool drive: a slab poured in panels with joints between them, thin, and laid on whatever was there at the time. Over half the housing here went up between 1945 and 1982, so a lot of it is the same age and fails in the same order.
A corner drops, a joint opens, the panel rocks, then water gets underneath and takes the fines out from below. Small cracks can be cut out and filled and left alone. Once a panel is moving, filling it is throwing money at a symptom, and the job is to break it out, dig to a proper formation, lay a geotextile membrane and compact a real sub-base before anything goes back on top.
Garage doors and front steps that take the water. A lot of these drives fall gently towards the house, which nobody notices until the surface has been resurfaced once or twice and the level has crept up. Then the garage floods and the doorstep sits in a puddle. The answer is a channel drain across the opening running into a gully with a real outfall, the falls reset away from the building, and the finished level dropped back below the damp proof course. Surface water goes to a soakaway, a border or a surface water drain, never into a foul drain, and on ground this wet the soakaway is sized from a percolation test first.
On the terraces and semis the frontage is narrow, so a parking bay has to be worked out properly: an edge restraint or a haunched kerb to hold the surface, a build-up that carries a vehicle, not just feet, and enough room to get in and out without three point turns into the road. Crossing the footway means a dropped kerb, and Planning Portal guidance on dropped kerbs covers how that crossing is applied for. Where a wall or a hedge line has to be opened we rebuild the ends properly and never leave them raw. Plenty of the drives here were block paved over the original base, not a new one, so they show wheel tracks, ponding by the garage and weeds through the joints; blocks are made to be lifted, so we take up the affected area, correct the depth, re-compact and relay the same units, then re-sand the whole drive with kiln dried sand. Out the back, flags go on a full mortar bed with the falls running away from the wall, and on slow ground we would rather build in a permeable margin than send everything to one gully, because in a wet winter the one gully is what gives up first. For the patio itself, see patios in Wool. Where the way in is a narrow lane or a parking court behind a terrace, the access decides the method, and that is time on the quote, not a surprise.
How it runs
Laying a new drive in front of a Wool house
Thomas comes out, looks at the frontage, how the ground drains and where the water goes now, and prices it himself. The dig and the laying are both on that quote.
The quote separates the excavation, disposal, the sub-base, the edgings, the surface and the drainage. On the estates many drives were laid for one car in the seventies, and widening them means a new dropped kerb, which is a Dorset Council highways matter we can point you to. Spoil leaves with us, the road is swept each evening, and if a soakaway or a soft patch turns up in the dig, we photograph it and price it before dealing with it.
Dorset Council is the planning authority. Homes near the old centre should check with the council for any conservation area before choosing a surface, and on one of the listed buildings the council can want listed building consent for hard landscaping against the building. At the front, a new hard surface over five square metres needs planning permission unless it is permeable or drains to a lawn, border or soakaway on your own land, as set out in Planning Portal guidance on paving your front garden. A patio at ground level round the back is permitted development.
Cost
What decides the price of a drive on Wool clay
What is underneath settles most of the price, not the surface you choose. Access. A terrace with a footway across the front, a semi where the only route to the back is a side gate, and a bungalow with a wide open drive are separate propositions before a shovel goes in. One takes a machine, another a barrow.
The dig. An old cracked concrete drive has to be broken out and carted away before the new sub-base goes in. How deep we dig, and how much spoil comes out, sets the disposal cost.
Drainage on slow ground. The clay in Wool drains slowly. A permeable surface may need a deeper sub-base to hold water while it soaks away. A drive that falls towards the house or garage needs a channel drain and somewhere for it to go. That is its own line, not an afterthought.
Width. Widening a frontage for two cars means more dig, more edging and possibly a kerb change.
The surface. Block paving, resin, tarmac and gravel on a grid each cost differently in material and labour.
Ask any other quote whether the edgings are haunched in concrete, how deep the sub-base is, and who carts away the spoil.
If it is urgent
A drive that floods or a slab that trips
Water getting into a garage or standing at a front door, or a slab that has dropped where people walk, will not wait. Put a board or a cone over the trip, and clear any channel or gully you can reach.
Call us on 07435 839745 rather than filling in the form, and say which problem it is. If nobody picks up, we ring you back as soon as we can. We make it safe and get the water moving on the first visit, and price the permanent work once the ground can be opened up. Booked work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm.
Worth knowing
A village whose drives were all built in the same few years
More than half the housing in Wool went up between the war and the early 1980s, and the biggest single push was the 1970s. That has an odd effect that people notice without quite naming it: the drives fail in waves. A whole road built at the same time was laid to the same detail, the same thickness and the same base, and it reaches the end of its life at the same time.
If your neighbour's concrete has started cracking and yours looks like it is holding, you are probably a couple of winters behind, not built better. The same goes for the pressed concrete edgings, the garage aprons and the original gullies, all of which came from one specification and give up on roughly one timetable.
Doing it in one go, and doing it with the neighbours, both save money. First, do the whole width and the whole depth once rather than half of it twice. The temptation on an estate drive is to resurface, and a resurface is exactly what raises the level towards the damp proof course and towards the garage door. If the base is thirty odd years past its best, taking it out and rebuilding it is the cheaper decade.
Second, talk to the neighbours. Where two or three houses on a run all need doing, one dig, one machine, one lorry and one lot of disposal covers all of them, and the saving is real because most of the fixed cost of a drive is getting the plant and the spoil in and out. We are happy to price two adjoining drives together and show you both, itemised, so nobody is guessing at who is paying for what.
Who you are dealing with
Drives laid in Wool, East Burton and Wareham
We lay drives in Wool, East Burton, Bovington, Winfrith Newburgh, Wareham and the villages along the Frome, and BH20 generally. The run from Boscombe is 17.1 miles. Dorset Council is the planning and building control authority. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd is registered in England and Wales under number 15471719. Before you book a visit in Wool, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.
Thomas Hannen owns it, and he is the person who looks at your frontage and puts a price on the drive. On Checkatrade a verified customer marked us 10 out of 10. Nothing is charged for the visit, and the quote is free as well.
Planning at a glance
Do you need planning permission in Wool?
Most repairs in Wool 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 Wool |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Dorset Council is the planning authority for Wool. Dorset Council's heritage pages set out what it controls. |
| Conservation area | Yes: Wool Conservation Area. It covers part of Wool, so check whether your street is inside it. |
| Listed buildings | Yes, there are listed buildings in and around Wool. If yours is one, work can need listed building consent. |
| Protected landscape | No National Park or National Landscape covers Wool. |
Questions
Questions about driveways in Wool
Water gets into the garage every downpour. Fixable on its own?
Usually, and without lifting the whole drive. Water reaching a garage normally comes off a drive falling towards it with nothing to intercept, so a threshold channel across the opening piped away takes it out. Ground at Wool is naturally wet, so whatever that channel discharges into has to be sized and sited on a test, not guessed at. If the drive falls the wrong way, the last couple of metres get relaid.
Does the conservation area cover the newer part of Wool?
It covers the older core rather than the whole village. The Wool Conservation Area boundary matters if you fall inside it, because a change of front surface is judged on appearance and like for like counts as maintenance. On the estates built between 1945 and 1982, which is 55.0% of the housing here, no such control applies and the only planning question left is the front garden drainage rule.
Who approves a new opening across the pavement?
Dorset Council's highways team, and it is a separate application from anything concerning the drive itself. They set the width, the construction depth under the footway and how the utility covers get dealt with, and the work in the highway must be done by an approved contractor. We build up to the boundary and leave the crossing detail ready, so the two pieces meet at the right level afterwards.
Can a patio sit on ground that stays wet?
Yes, but not on a bed of sand over soft soil. On the wet ground around Wool a terrace needs a compacted stone base thick enough to spread the load, a full mortar bed instead of five dabs under each slab, and a fall of about one in eighty away from the house. Slabs bedded on dabs over wet ground rock within a season, because water gets underneath and the soil shifts.
Why has one end broken up and not the other?
Because load and water both concentrate there. The turning end, where wheels scrub and the car stands overnight, takes far more punishment than the run in, and it is generally the low end where water gathers as well. Around Wool the ground holds moisture, so a saturated base under the standing area fails while the rest still looks sound. We price the failed section and the drainage instead of relaying everything.
Nearby, and next door
Driveways near Wool
Nearby places we also cover for driveways, with straight-line distances from Wool, and the other trades we offer in Wool itself.
Driveways nearby
Our other trades in Wool
Driveways and patios guides
Driveway planning permission and where water goes Sunken or ponding driveway: base or drainage Indian sandstone vs porcelain paving: an honest comparisonEverything we do in Wareham Driveways, all areas Every area we cover
Free quote
Free quote for a drive or patio in Wool
Ring or send a photograph and we will come and look properly. The visit and the written itemised quote are free.