Start with the driveway, not the price

Three things to have ready

1. The address. Where a property sits in this metro says a surprising amount before anyone has seen it — which side of the fall line the soil is on, roughly when the house or the building went up, and whether the drive is likely to be forty feet or four hundred.
2. Rough dimensions. Length and width of a drive, or approximate square footage of a lot. Precision is not needed; the difference between a 600 and a 6,000 square foot job is what actually changes the conversation.
3. What is bothering you. Cracks spreading in a pattern, edges crumbling, water standing after a storm, a pothole that has been filled twice, or simply that it has gone grey and chalky. Each of those points somewhere different.

The photograph almost nobody sends

Pictures of the damage are useful. Pictures of water are better, and they are the ones that rarely arrive.

Walk out during or just after rain and photograph anywhere water sits instead of running off — a low spot mid-drive, a puddle against the garage apron, a strip that stays dark along an edge long after the rest has dried. Richmond's clay does not shed water quickly, and standing water is the single most reliable predictor of what a pavement is going to do next. A drive that sheds cleanly and a drive that ponds can look identical on a dry afternoon and have completely different futures.

Gravel, and converting it

If the drive is currently gravel and the question is what it would take to pave it, say so early. That is a different project from resurfacing, and the honest answer usually has more to do with grading, drainage and the length of the run than with asphalt. Long rural approaches in Powhatan and western Chesterfield in particular are drainage projects that happen to end in a black surface.

What happens next

Someone walks the property. Between photographs and half an hour on site, the questions that decide the job get answered: whether the distress begins at the surface or underneath it, where water goes and where it does not, whether tree roots are involved, how thick what is already there appears to be, and whether the right answer is a repair, an overlay or a rebuild.

Until that has happened a number carries no information. Two contractors can walk the same drive and honestly quote very different work, because one is pricing a surface and the other is pricing a structure. Agreeing the findings before anyone reaches for a number is the only thing that puts competing bids on the same footing.

If you are buying the house

Worth a call before closing. A long drive is one of the larger deferred items on a rural or semi-rural Richmond property, and a tired-looking surface and a structurally failed one photograph almost the same. The difference between them is usually visible in twenty minutes on site and invisible in an inspection summary.

Request a callback

Send the address and what the surface is doing. We will call you back.