Sealing a Concrete Driveway: When It Helps
I have sealed the same 900 square feet of shop apron three times with three products, and only one was worth the Saturday. The first was a cheap acrylic that looked glossy for a season, then went milky in the…
Aprons, Gutters and the Public Right of Way
Every rollback that brought me a car dragged its tail coming in. The drop from my apron to the gutter pan was about two inches over a short run, steep enough that low tow decks and lowered cars scraped on…
Winter Repairs: What Can and Cannot Be Done Cold
The apron outside my center overhead door split in the second week of January, right along the line where the rollback sets its wheel lift down. By the end of the month one side had dropped half an inch and…
Tree Roots Under Slabs and Driveways
The northeast corner of my customer pad came up an inch and a quarter over four years, and most of that time I blamed the base. It rocked a floor jack, puddled backward, and caught a customer’s air dam hard…
Driveway Widths and Parking Two Cars Comfortably
My back pad measured 19 feet across and I called it a two-car pad for six years. It is two cars right up until somebody has to get out. Park a crew cab on one side and a sedan on…
Shop Floors for Lifts and Heavy Equipment
A used two-post lift turns up on local classifieds every few weeks at $1,200 to $2,500, which is cheap enough that people buy first and ask about the floor second. The asking-about-the-floor part is what got me interested, because the…
Curing Time vs Load Time: When Can You Drive On It
Twenty-eight days is the most repeated number in residential concrete and the most misunderstood. In one week I heard a homeowner told to keep every vehicle off a new driveway for a month, and watched a finishing crew drive a…
When a Driveway Is Past Saving
The driveway I keep coming back to sits on a Rockrimmon hillside: about 900 square feet, poured in the late 1990s, with eleven cracks wider than a pencil, a 2 inch step where the slab meets the garage apron, and…
Drainage Slopes That Actually Move Water
Two contractors stood on the same back patio and disagreed about whether it drained. One had a laser. The other carried a 4 foot level with a scrap of shim taped to one end, set it down four times, and…
Concrete, Asphalt or Pavers for a Driveway
Three bids on the same 640 square foot driveway came back at $5,100, $9,900 and $15,400. Same slope, same access, same week. The low one was asphalt, the middle concrete, the high one interlocking pavers, and none of the three…