A driveway fails from underneath. Almost everything we do happens before the truck arrives.
Homeowners judge a driveway by the surface, which is reasonable, because that is the part you can see. Concrete does not fail there. It fails because the ground under it moved, and the ground moved because the base was thin, poorly drained, or never compacted properly in the first place.
So most of the money and most of the days on a driveway job go into the part that ends up buried. That is not a sales line, it is the whole difference between a slab that is flat in twenty years and one that is stepped and cracked in five.
Pouring new concrete on top of a failed driveway is the cheapest thing a contractor can sell you and it is almost always the wrong answer. The old slab moved for a reason, that reason is still down there, and now it is under four more inches of concrete.
We take the old slab out, haul it away, and deal with what we find. Occasionally what we find is a genuinely sound base, and when that happens we say so, because we would rather do the smaller job than talk you into the bigger one.
We dig past the old fill to ground that will carry load, then build granular back up in lifts and compact each lift rather than dumping the full depth and running a plate over the top of it. Compaction only travels so far down. A 300mm dump compacted from the surface is compacted for the first 100mm and loose underneath, which is exactly the condition that produces settlement two winters later.
Drainage gets designed at the same time. Water that cannot get out from under a slab freezes under it, and freezing water expands about nine percent. That is the force that lifts driveways, and no amount of good concrete resists it.
Concrete cracks. Every slab does, because concrete shrinks as it cures and it is restrained while it shrinks. The job is not to prevent cracking, it is to decide where it happens.
Control joints cut to depth and spaced to the slab give the shrinkage somewhere to go, so the crack forms in a straight sawn line instead of wandering across the middle of the driveway. Reinforcement, mesh or bar depending on the load, holds the two sides of that crack tight together so it stays a line rather than becoming a step.
Broom finish is the default for a driveway and there is nothing second rate about it: it is the most slip resistant, the easiest to clear snow off, and the least maintenance. Exposed aggregate gives you texture and hides surface wear well. Stamped gives you a pattern and integral colour and is the one that changes how the front of a house reads.
All three get sealed. Sealer is what keeps road salt out of the surface, and road salt is what causes the flaking and pitting you see on ten year old driveways around here. Decorative finishes want resealing on a cycle and we will tell you what that cycle actually is before you choose, not after.
A number off a website is a guess, and guesses turn into surprises on the invoice. Every job is priced to what is actually in front of us. These are the things that move it:
The site visit is free. The quote comes back itemized, with the HST and the total including HST shown, inside 48 hours. What you sign is what you pay.
Typically four to seven days on site: demolition and haul-away, excavation, base and compaction, forming, pour, finish, then cure. You can usually walk on it in a day or two and park on it in about a week, though we will give you the actual dates for your job rather than a rule of thumb.
Asphalt is cheaper up front and needs resealing every few years, and it softens in real heat. Concrete costs more to put in and lasts substantially longer with less attention. If you are staying in the house, concrete usually wins over the life of it. If you are selling in two years, that is a different calculation and we will say so.
Yes, and so will every other concrete driveway in Ontario. Concrete shrinks as it cures and it cracks where it is restrained. The difference between a good job and a bad one is that on a good job the cracks are in the sawn joints where we put them, and the reinforcement holds them tight so they stay hairlines rather than becoming steps.
Often, yes, if the existing slab is sound. The joint between the old and the new is the part that decides whether it reads as one driveway or as a patch, so we saw a clean edge, dowel into the existing slab and match the finish rather than butting new against old.
Real jobs, real photos. Nothing on this page is a render.
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