Resin driveway in Sherborne, on a base that had already failed once

What was wrong

The driveway had been resurfaced three years earlier by somebody else and was already breaking up along the line where cars turn. Two things were going on, and only one of them was visible.

The sub-base was about 80 mm of crushed concrete where it needed 150 mm of properly compacted MOT Type 1, so it was moving under load. And the fall ran towards the house rather than away from it, which meant every heavy shower put water against the wall and under the surface, where it froze.

What we did

• Took up the existing surface and the failed sub-base — 14 tonnes away, with transfer notes.
• Dug out and recompacted to 150 mm in two layers, whacked in lifts rather than in one pass.
• Reset the falls away from the house and put in a linear drain across the threshold, connected to a soakaway at the far corner.
• Laid 18 mm resin bound aggregate over a permeable base course, with an aluminium edge along the lawn side.

The drainage was the part not in the original quote. We found the fall problem on day two, stopped, and rang the customer before doing anything about it — it added £1,400 and two days, and relaying a surface over the same problem would have been a waste of both of our time.

How it has held up

Two winters, including the freeze in January. No movement along the turn, no standing water at the threshold, no weed growth through the surface. We went back at twelve months to look at it, which is part of the ten-year guarantee rather than a favour.