Sealing the driveway - Building From Scratch

One bummer about our paver driveway is that the pavers show tire tread marks and the pavers soak up any kind of oily material which forms a stain. Here you can see the driveway with the tread marks.

So we decided to have the driveway cleaned and sealed. I tried cleaning the driveway myself at first, with a standard power washer, but this was a disaster. The driveway wasn’t that clean in the end, and the power washer blew the stones out of the cracks between the pavers, which took many hours of sweeping over the next week to (mostly) get back in place. We have permeable pavers, which have spaces between the bricks filled with pea gravel, to allow the water to percolate down.

We managed to find a local stone and tile restoration company that would quote us on cleaning and sealing the driveway.

The first step was cleaning. They had a special power washing tool.

It did a much better job at cleaning, and the pebbles between the cracks of our permeable pavers (the grout) mostly stayed in place. They used some mild detergent on the more stubborn stains.

Next, they re-grouted the driveway by sweeping some additional pea gravel back and forth across the cracks which was a lot of work. Here are the clean and re-grouted pavers.

Lastly they sealed the driveway with a material that is supposed to last 10 years. This is where it got expensive. Our quote included material at cost, but it wasn’t clear exactly how much material we would need, and it took a lot, almost 40 gallons, and each gallon was quite expensive. But the result was great.

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