We currently have a two car, park in line, driveway. Its on gentle slope down to garage. Its a gravel drive and needs topping up every few years as the stones go awol.

We are thinking about creating a new space from the garden so we don’t have to keep swapping cars around and our kids will be driving soo so will likely need another space. This seems a good opportunity to replace the driveway. I don’t want to tarmac it as it will be a big space and the tarmac will just look dominant. I don’t like monoblock, quite like the look of resin. Has anyone got any first world experience of this or better suggestions.

Do you like the gravel? If so, grids and gravel. You’ll still need to top up every so often though.

Rubber crumb can look nice and comes in a wide array of colours,it’s also recycled which is good.

We looked into this and went tarmac in the end:

* liked concrete imprinted drives for the look – but just walking round the local area everyone of them is cracked in some way

* Block paving seems a bit retro now and you periodically need to mess about re grouting them / cleaning them

* resin bound driveways were our first choice but the costs we were quoted were mental. Cost £7k for tarmac and every company we approached wanted near double for resin. It seems they lay pourous tarmac down as a base (after the compacted aggregate) and then hand lay the resin as a final layer on top.

We had half old tarmac / half lawn before we got it done and several companies just wanted to resin over the old tarmac (which had indents and ridges in it from the weight of cars sitting on it) and only do the lawn bit from scratch.

The company that tarmacced it took the whole lot up and started from scratch but I’m sure they didn’t put down enough aggregate / didn’t compact it enough as a few years later we’re already starting to get dips in it where the cars sit. So annoying but most drive companies seem to be cowboys of varying levels.

I did the exact same thing, ours has a slight slope to road and all the gravel drives near me all dump stones onto road, so i used granite chippings, square in shape and much rougher texture, more expensive, but looks so much better and they don’t tend to drift downwards at all with the cars driving on and off.

resin is ok until it fills up with dirt and starts growing weeds.

How about a reinforced driveway mesh with grass grown through it?

We use brick pavers, you get packs of the same “shade” that has a nice variance. Once the sub-base is done the paving is super fast if the blokes know their stuff, and its v durable.
Our typical subbase is something like 8″ of mot, then 2-3inches of sand.
Get pencil edge pavers and brush kiln dried sand into the gaps.
Typically we lay a couple of 40mm pipes across to the street for future telephone or fibre optic things which come in super handy when tenants install new stuff.

Maintenance- there is no grout, just brush kiln dried sand in on a bloody hot/dry day. We spray weedkiller in march/april and then sand top up in late summer.

I did the exact same thing, ours has a slight slope to road and all the gravel drives near me all dump stones onto road, so i used granite chippings, square in shape and much rougher texture, more expensive, but looks so much better and they don’t tend to drift downwards at all with the cars driving on and off.

I’m interested in the granite chipping option. I don’t think I’ve seen that. Our drive is pretty big and I don’t want tarmac again.  Pavers would be a massive cost and I’ve heard negatives about resin.

cheddarchallenged
Full Member

resin is ok until it fills up with dirt and starts growing weeds.

Can resin be cleaned up with a patio cleaner attachment on a pressure washer?

Mine is granite type angled chips (cotswold gold IIRC?), they don’t tend to move tbh, but they do break down into sand and then the weeds grow in that, needs a wee bit of attention now and again. I do like a nice tarmac drive, with white chips through it.

I’ve noticed some paved / blockwork driveways look really good, with contrasting edges, but ovr time the colours all blend in to one as they either get bleached by the sun or get dirty. These tend to be the coloured concrete blocks. Is there any way of preserving the contrasts over time?

Neighbours paid a fortune for resin, keeps losing bits which the company repairs but its starting to look patchwork after less than 2 years.  I’d be fuming if I’d have paid for that.

I’ve noticed some paved / blockwork driveways look really good, with contrasting edges, but ovr time the colours all blend in to one as they either get bleached by the sun or get dirty. These tend to be the coloured concrete blocks. Is there any way of preserving the contrasts over time?

Mibbe our weather, ie wet? Block paving drives in the likes of Spain seem to always look sharp.

we were told (by the bloke who quoted to do ours in resin) that a)unless its on a concrete or other hard immobile base they crack and b)when they do crack you will never match the colour so any repairs look rubbish.

Recently replaced our old tired looking block paved driveway with tarmac. By far the cheapest, quickest and easiest option. We used some of the old pavers to edge it and create a dividing line to help guide cars into the space. They break the tarmac up nicely and stop it looking like a big slab of plain old tarmac.

A neighbour (with a lorry and a roller), told us to use sharp edged gravel on the drive as it sticks/locks together much better than the smooth pebble type stuff which tends to slide.

Gentle slope down to the garage, non draining surface, increasingly heavy bursts of rain, what could go wrong, well if the bloke across the road is anything to go by (*he doesn’t clear out the bottom of the slope drainage channels ever), everything on the garage getting wet when it rains heavily appears to the case…….

Previous owners had the drive block paved, I’m not a fan and five years in it’s got ripples in it from the cars. Couple of neighbours have had resin drives at great expense they’re not fans of resin any more either, cracks appearing after a couple of years. If it was level I’d be putting gravel in, however I’ll be paving it with Indian stone when I get round to it.

Just spent a lot of the weekend pressure washing my block-paved drive (installed by previous owner).

I’d go for tarmac or some kind of gridding that would allow grass to grow (and be mown).

Must admit I like the idea of the griding

Just spent a lot of the weekend pressure washing my block-paved drive.

I sort of need to do ours, but assumed that the pressure washer would start blasting out the sand from the gaps and undermining the sand underneath.

Guessing I’m probably over-worrying?

Any weeds fix with weedkiller or flamethrower, any moss/detritus scrape out with a hoe, when its really dry brush in kiln dried sand.
If you weedkill in spring you wont have to scrape it very often.

Previous owners had the drive block paved, I’m not a fan and five years in it’s got ripples in it from the cars.

This has been badly laid, I’ve never seen this on any of the ones we have laid over the last 20 years – residential property and commercial property with car parks.

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chakaping
Full Member

Just spent a lot of the weekend pressure washing my block-paved drive (installed by previous owner).

Get a patio cleaner attachment – much, much better/faster ime

I sort of need to do ours, but assumed that the pressure washer would start blasting out the sand from the gaps and undermining the sand underneath.

I thought similar because people on the internet said so, my dad reassured me it’d been fine when he did his – so I did it and it seems fine.

Get a patio cleaner attachment – much, much better/faster ime

I had to get a lot of crusted dirt out from between the blocks. I’d not touched it for years.

Roman road, every time.
Dig it out 1m deep. Set some big stones/boulders along each side then infill with igneous rocks, sand and cap it with natural limestone slabs.
Will last for centuries.

I guess block paving could be pretty economical if staying somewhere very long term – if it does ever go wavy then lift the blocks, tidy up the sub-base and re-lay.

Any weeds fix with weedkiller or flamethrower, any moss/detritus scrape out with a hoe, when its really dry brush in kiln dried sand.
If you weedkill in spring you wont have to scrape it very often

I’m a slave to weeds and moss in block paving. I absolutely hate it. Have to tend to it daily.

Seems like most people just leave it and let it grow.

Block paving looks great for about a year.

I would pay good money to never see weeds again.

I’ve ordered a flamethrower to get my weeds under control.

As I said, I’ve left it a while.

Extend the gravel ? Promotes drainage.

Our neighbour doesn’t look after his block paving despite being a builder. He should know better. It’s full of weeds again after pulling the whole lot up and relaying it over weeks, two years ago.

What is resin like after rain or snow/ice? I’ve always liked the look of it but concerned it would be super slippy.

I would like an exposed aggregate concrete drive, but can’t find any places (remotely local) that specialise in it.

Looks a bit like resin, much stronger, downside being repairs may be hard to match.

It’s concrete but with a prettier aggregate, and stop the top layer setting and then hose it off.

I’m a slave to weeds and moss in block paving. I absolutely hate it. Have to tend to it daily.

Weedkiller in march/april works like a charm. You still get moss but it’s better to let it grow a bit so you can get under it with the hoe. It’s not hard. I do the moss on mine once a year.

Have a combination of tarmac, gravel and block paving driveway. They have been easy to awful to look after in that order. I’ve just had the block paving removed and granite cobbles put in properly on a bed of concrete. Frankly, I couldn’t see a nuclear strike shifting the cobbles let alone a weed or two.

When we had our very elderly and very shonky tarmac drive replaced some years ago, I fancied imprinted concrete. The advice from a couple of friends was “It looks nice for a while, but fades or dulls. And the other thing is if you ever need to get any of it up to access services underneath (water/gas pipe, phone cable, whatever) it’ll need replaced completely” The same principle applies to many of the other suggestions such as new tarmac or resin or whatever.
So we went with block paving, and of course have never yet had to lift a block of it in 15 years. Is there a lesson in that? Christ only knows. I do know it’s probably (over)due a good pressurewashing of some description, to be fair.

I would avoid a resin driveway. We got sucked in by the marketing pitch. Paid for additional ground work as we were told that without this we would not get the warranty cover.

Within 10 months we have dips in the surface where the cars sit. Then ensued 2 years of emails and phone calls before a post on social media got someone out to look at the problem (which was now far worse). Told I would be called to arrange the remedial works. That was 3 years ago… The company went into liquidation. My wife recently found a company using the same logo and similar name trading.

The company in question was resindrives.co.uk Ltd.

Not that I’m still bitter. But if you do go resin make sure the company you use is reputable with good work of mouth recommendations.

At least with something like block paving any good builder would be able to repair any dips. Unlike resin which would need the whole surface relaying to avoid patches and colour differences in the aggregate.

We had our driveway replaced last year. Before we replaced it was broken concrete, which looked to have been laid at various points over the last 20 or so years and looked a real mess. After lots of looking around we replaced it with block paving, we went with a tumbled grey paver in three different sizes. It cost a bit more than having it laid with standard herringbone pavers, but looks a lot better. A year later it is looking good, minimal amount of weeds so far.