LESLIE: Carol in Texas is on the line and needs some help with a driveway asphalt repair. What’s going on?
CAROL: We have a single-car, asphalt driveway that goes out of the farm market road, past the front of the house to the back of the house. And it goes between the house deck – I mean the deck on the house – and the storage with a carport. And it’s a single-car, asphalt drive. Goes around a tree and then comes back out. Makes a circle and comes back out and it’s very important to this property. And it’s on a slope. And we want to redo it but we don’t exactly want to dig up the whole thing and start over.
TOM: OK. What’s the condition of the driveway right now, Carol?
CAROL: Well, I wouldn’t call it very good; I wouldn’t call it the worst I’ve ever seen.
TOM: Well, here are your options when it comes to restoring an asphalt driveway. If the driveway is in structurally good shape, it is proper maintenance to repair the cracks, patch any holes and then reseal the entire surface. However, if the driveway structurally is in poor condition – if it’s got really broken-out sections, washed-out sections, if it’s sunken – then all of the sealing and patching in the world is not going to change that.
So it might be that there’s a combination of things that you’re going to do here but you can do the sealing and the patching yourself. If you want to replace it then, of course, that’s a job for a pro. And there’s sort of an in-between step, too, and we’d have to have a pro look at this to determine if this is possible. But sometimes, you can add an additional layer of asphalt to it and leave what you have in place but put another layer on top of it that’s maybe an inch to 2 inches thick, that could be less expensive than tearing the whole thing out. Does that make sense?
CAROL: Right. Well, more than anything, we just want it to look better than what it does because we plan on putting our house on the market this summer, because we’re 69 and 71. And so what we’re going to do is downsize because the farm is a lot of work.
TOM: Good luck with that project. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
When is the bad shape of a driveway bad enough that a new layer should be considered. Cracks are normal, sinking where cars are normally parked happens all the time, and small holes aren't a big deal. When do all of these little things add up to be enough to warrant an entire resurfacing?