Driveways & Paving

A mate of mine relaid a courtyard in Miramar four years ago, over what he was told was just a sand bed on the clay underneath, because that was how the original patio had gone in decades earlier. By the second winter the pavers along one edge had dropped enough to catch a wheelbarrow wheel, […]

The driveway in question was poured in early June, on a Mornington section that drops away sharply enough that the concrete truck couldn’t get any closer than the road above. By nine the next morning there was a skin of frost sitting across the shaded half of the slab, and a hairline crack running diagonally

A driveway out at Terrace End had a grid of hairline cracks running in two parallel lines the exact width of a tractor’s rear wheels, right where the owner had been backing a loaded trailer in and parking it for the winter. The slab was standard 100 mm residential concrete, poured to a spec that

An exposed aggregate driveway a couple of streets back from the beach at Mount Maunganui had gone pale and chalky within about four summers, the surface sealer worn off entirely and a scatter of the smaller aggregate stones starting to work loose at one edge where the sun hit hardest through the afternoon. The concrete

A driveway in Papanui I looked at a few years back still had a faint grey tide-mark across it, a stain left by silt that had pumped up through the joints and pooled across the slab during the big shakes, then dried into the concrete like a watermark on old wallpaper. The slab itself had

A driveway out at Flagstaff cracked clean across on a diagonal two winters after it was poured, nowhere near a joint, right where the slab crossed what turned out to be an old drain line filled with peat rather than compacted metal. The concrete itself was not the problem. The joint spacing was fine on

The driveway two sections below mine on the hill drops away from the garage at close to 1 in 4, and every heavy downpour it turns into a shallow river across the last five metres before the kerb. It isn’t bad concrete. The slab is sound, no cracking, no spalling. It was simply laid to