Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Lady Bay

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Lady Bay homes

Air bricks at ankle height feed the void under these floors, and raised borders have already half buried them. Before any water goes down we find them and settle where the slurry runs, because this ground takes a long time to let go of it.

There is no drive on most of these streets. What there is at the back is a small walled yard, blue brick pavior or concrete flag, six or seven paces across with walls on three sides of it, and at the front a path, a low wall and the car on the road. At the embankment end the interwar semis do have drives, usually block paving laid over the original strip, and the two jobs share almost nothing. A yard that size cannot be worked from any distance, so a rotary head is not a preference here but the only way to keep the pass even between walls that are permanently in the way. The drives take the full sequence, wash and then re-sand. The yards mostly take chemistry and patience instead.

Lady Bay sits in NG2, under Rushcliffe Borough Council. Regular domestic cleaning takes most of the diary, in houses where people walk to the shops and the school rather than drive. Deep cleans come next, booked when the damp jobs have gone a season too long. Carpet and upholstery work follows, and here it is asked for as much for the smell as for the look of it.

What we run into on Lady Bay driveway & patio cleaning jobs

Old clay pavior and blue brick have a fired skin, and the whole job is about leaving it there. The body underneath is soft and open, so a lance held too close takes the surface off in a patch that looks brighter for a fortnight and then goes green faster than the brick around it, because it now holds water like a sponge. Lime mortar between old flags washes out at a pressure the flag itself shrugs off. In a yard walled on three sides the algae is thickest in a band along the base of every wall, where splash keeps the surface wet for most of the year, and that band wants dwell time rather than a harder nozzle.

How a Lady Bay driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Two things get located before any water goes on. The air bricks ventilating the void under the ground floor sit at ankle height, and on a good many of these houses a raised border, a decked corner or one more layer of paving has already half buried them, so we find them, cover them and work away from them rather than washing a yard of slurry into the one thing keeping that floor dry. The second is where the water is going afterwards. A yard this size usually falls to a single gully, often shared with next door or sitting right on the boundary, and the ground here is river silt that takes surface water slowly, so slurry does not disappear simply because it has gone out of sight. We sweep and vacuum it up rather than flushing it away, and the gully grating gets cleared before we finish rather than left for the next downpour. The rest is access. Hoses come along the entry or through the house, the machine stands at the front, and the neighbour's washing, their open window and their side of the shared wall all get a word before we start instead of afterwards.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly Edwardian terraces and interwar semis on a short grid of quiet streets, laid out between the river and the flood embankment, with bay fronts, tunnel entries between pairs and very little later infill, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Lady Bay on the same round as West Bridgford, The Meadows and Sneinton.

What we check on every Lady Bay job

Yards get resurfaced rather than replaced, and every layer sits on the last one. Look at the back door threshold in one of these houses and the step down into the yard has often become a step up, or nothing at all, because the paving has climbed two or three inches over the decades. The brickwork tells you what that has cost. There is usually a band a couple of courses high just above the paving that reads darker, feels softer and is sometimes crumbling at the face, with a white bloom on it in dry weather, and that is roughly the level the damp course used to be working at. Washing the paving makes the yard look better and changes nothing at all about the cause. We point it out and photograph it, because lifting a layer of paving back off is a real fix and a clean is not.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• The clean: Pressure and nozzle set to the surface, well down on sandstone, limestone and porcelain from what concrete takes
• The clean: Slurry swept and vacuumed up rather than flushed into the nearest gully or run onto next door's garden
• Putting it back: Sand worked down and topped up in stages rather than scattered once and swept off
• Putting it back: Drainage channels and gully gratings cleared of what came off the paving

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full driveway & patio cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.