New asphalt for driveways around Cleveland: tear-out and rebuild, overlays, aprons, and the long narrow drives that run back to a garage behind the house. A drive on the south shore of Lake Erie spends months under snow, slush and meltwater, and a new one should be built for that. This page covers how the decision gets made, what the job involves, and what sets the price.
A tired-looking drive is not automatically a paving job. If the surface is grey but whole, it needs a coat of sealer, and the checks on this page will say so. If it is sound apart from a pothole or a broken corner, it needs a proper repair. If it is worn across the top but still firm, an overlay can give it a new surface for far less than a rebuild. Only when the base has gone, which shows as heaving, sinking, ruts and cracks joined into small plates, does the old drive have to come out.
Frost is what ends most drives on this side of the state. Water gets into the stone under the asphalt, freezes, expands and lifts the surface, then drops it again when it thaws. A winter here does that many times over. The defence is not thicker asphalt on its own. It is a base deep enough and well enough compacted to shed water, on ground that has been dug out wherever it is soft.
The finished pitch matters just as much. A snowbank along the edge of a drive melts a little every sunny afternoon and freezes again every night. If the drive is flat, or tips toward the house, that meltwater runs across it and becomes a sheet of ice by morning, and some of it finds its way under the foundation or into the garage. A new drive is shaped so meltwater leaves it along a planned route, away from the house and toward the street or a drain.
Every drive has a side where the snow ends up, whether a shovel, a snow blower or a plow put it there. That edge carries weight and wet all winter, and it is usually the first to crumble. On a new drive it gets a firm edge and solid ground beside it rather than a soft lawn edge, and if a plow service clears the drive, it is worth telling them where the new edges are before the first storm.
On a lot of older streets the drive is one car wide and runs down the side of the house to a detached garage at the rear, sometimes with the neighbour's house a few feet away. Paving one of those is its own job. The equipment has to be small enough to get down the side of the house, more of the mix is placed by hand, and the finished surface has to fall away from both foundations. Where two houses share one drive, both owners agree the work before it is booked.
Around Cleveland it is common for a city to require every contractor, and every subcontractor, to register with its building department before any permit is pulled, often with a bond and proof of insurance, renewed each year. Some cities also want a permit to replace or resurface a private driveway, not just the apron. The apron itself, from the sidewalk to the street, is usually city right-of-way with its own permit. The county pages list what each city publishes, and the quote says which contractor holds the registration and pulls the permit. Paving is only taken on where the contractor on that job is registered with that city.
Paving is priced per job after the drive is measured and the base is looked at. These are the things that move it:
You get one written figure, with the scope set out: what comes out, how deep the stone goes, how thick the asphalt is, how the water leaves, and what happens at the street.
Hot mix needs dry, unfrozen ground and warm air to compact, and the local plants close for the winter, so paving here is a spring to late fall job with the last weeks booked first. A drive that cannot be done before the ground freezes waits for spring rather than going down cold.
The new surface then needs six to twelve months before its first coat of sealer, so a drive paved this summer is sealed next summer, and every two to three years after that.
On a lot, the same decision is made section by section: rebuild what has failed, patch what can be saved, then seal and restripe the whole surface so it wears evenly. Where the snow is piled all winter usually decides where the worst sections are. See parking lot sealcoating and striping and, for associations and managed properties, HOAs and property managers.
Send the address through the form and choose paving. The drive is measured and looked at, and you are told straight whether it needs new asphalt at all. If it does, you get a written scope and one price, and the paving is done by a local independent paving contractor.
