Monday 23 February 2009

[Tips.017] A little tip about your drive way

We have a visitor the other day asking why we don't extend our drive way from our boundary to the road, as shown below from one of the houses in our suburb with the front part of drive way highlighted.

It would certainly look better and actually that was our original plan. But after discussion with our landscaper Joe, we learned that because that part of the drive way belongs to the council, there's a risk if we extend our paving all the way to the road.

We all know that occasionally, the council would have some sort of maintenance work on sewage, water pipes, gas pipes, underground pipes, ...etc for whatever reason. When it happens, your drive way could be more or less damaged. According to Joe, our council will only replace whichever part of the damaged drive way with concrete. To fix it properly using the same paving (or even concrete stencil surfacing) would be at our own cost.

Plus, as that could be X months/years later and it would be almost impossible to get the exactly same colour of bricks(as it would be from different batch), it won't look good at all!

Well, I guess you can say that we could just order extra bricks and keep it somewhere as spares. We did have some, but surely won't be enough if it's a major work. Plus the worry of extra cost and trouble also scares us a bit.

That's why after some discussion, we decided to do the paving of our drive way up to the boundary only.

One other thing is, may be your council is different from ours, better find out the answer from your council in case you believe extending the drive way to the road is quite important to you...

So for all of you who still hasn't finish your drive way, there's this little extra thing FYI and hope you find it helpful!

3 comments:

DesignTies said...

Great looking driveway, Allan... and good advice.
Thanks for choosing to follow our blog!
Victoria @ DesignTies

DesignTies said...

Oh, Victoria beat me to thanking you for following our blog!! But I'll say Thank You too anyway :-)

Here in Ottawa, we have the exact same driveway situation as you do. Our driveway is about 2/3 interlocking brick and 1/3 asphalt for the same reason as yours -- that part of the driveway technically belongs to the city.

Back in the fall, a driveway up our street was pulled apart to repair a burst pipe. Their brick went right to the street, and it was a long time before it was repaired.

That being said, I think you did the right thing with your driveway decision.

Now, off to explore more of your blog!!

Kelly (also @ DesignTies)

BuildingOurFirstHouse said...

Thanks for your comments Victoria/Kelly,

Love the design and look/feel of you blog, and all those beautiful photos/designs.

I am not that good with colour selection and have to rely on wife to do all those stuffs.

I believe there's thousands of people like me who needs some sort of simple "colour selection for dummies" service/lessons.

It would be even better if you can provide more examples of "before vs after" photos of all the works you've done.

Keep on the good work!

Cheers
Allan