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The parts of the metro we work
One region, and the ground under it changes character every few miles.
Richmond sits on the fall line, which is a geological way of saying the metro is built on two different things. East and south of the city the ground is coastal plain — sands, silts and marine clays that drain unevenly. West and north it is Piedmont, and that means the red clay this region is known for: dense, slow to drain, and capable of holding water against the underside of a pavement for weeks after the rain that put it there.
That difference decides a great deal. So does the age of the housing stock, which runs from pre-war streets in Ashland to subdivisions in Midlothian that have not finished settling. So does the length of the drive — a 400-foot rural approach in Powhatan is a drainage project with asphalt on top, and a 40-foot suburban apron is not.
What a four-hundred-foot approach does that a suburban apron never will
On a large Powhatan lot the driveway is rarely the short black rectangle a suburban owner pictures. It is a private road, and a private road on Piedmont clay lives or dies on what happens to the water it collects along its own length.
In Chesterfield the soil is the variable, and everything else is a response to it
Chesterfield covers a great deal of ground and a wide span of housing ages, but one thing runs underneath almost all of it. The county sits on Piedmont clay, and clay is not a neutral foundation that simply sits there holding up whatever is placed on it.
Pavement that has to satisfy an engineer and a committee at the same time
In much of Glen Allen the pavement has an audience. Appearance standards are part of the brief here in a way they are not on an unrestricted rural lot, and that changes which repair is the right one as often as the soil does.
Short drives, old trees, and pavement laid in four different decades
Most pavement problems in this town come from one of two sources that are older than the pavement itself: the trees along the lot line, and whatever was used as a base when the drive was first put in.
Ten years of doing nothing, and what it costs to catch up
A driveway does not fail on the day it fails. It works through a fairly predictable sequence over several years, and almost every stage of that sequence is cheaper to interrupt than the stage after it.
A young driveway with a dip in it is usually reporting on the ground, not the asphalt
On recently built ground, a depression in a driveway is often not a fault in the pavement at all. It is the site finishing a process that began before the house was framed.
Here the weight on the pavement matters more than the weather over it
Most driveway advice in this region is really advice about water. On this side of the metro there is a second variable that often outranks it, and it is the weight of what drives across the pavement.
Somewhere else in the metro and not on this list? The underlying conditions — clay that moves with moisture, a freeze-thaw season that is short but real, and summer heat that softens a surface before the trucks arrive — are shared across the region, so it is worth a conversation either way.
Talk through your site
Start with the address, roughly how many square feet, and photographs of the worst areas and anywhere water sits after rain.