Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Lenton

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Lenton homes

Almost nothing here was laid as a drive. Front gardens were paved into parking at the point the house was converted, put down on old garden soil rather than a sub base, and the water off them falls straight towards the pavement.

Very little here was laid as a drive. What exists is front gardens paved over to make a house lettable, usually at the point it was converted, in concrete blocks or in a thin bed of gravel over whatever was already there. The width of a terrace frontage takes one car nose in and the frontage of a larger boulevard house takes two or three, and the ground under both is old garden soil rather than a compacted sub base. That is why they rut, why blocks rock at the point a wheel turns, and why the jointing sand went years ago. Where the water goes is the other half of the question, because these surfaces sit slightly above a public pavement and fall towards it.

Lenton sits in NG7, under Nottingham City Council. Almost entirely rental. Landlords and letting agents booking turnarounds, and outgoing students booking end of tenancy cleans against a check-in inventory they may never have read.

What we run into on Lenton driveway & patio cleaning jobs

The wear pattern tells you where the car sits without anybody saying. Two dished tracks a wheelbase apart, deepest at the point the steering gets turned while the car is stationary, which grinds blocks against each other and rounds the top edges off them. Between the tracks the paving is often still sound and still holds sand in the joints. At the pavement end there is normally a line where the edge restraint has spread and the blocks have crept forward into it. In the middle of all that sits a dark patch under where the engine stands, which is old oil soaked into the body of the block rather than something lying on the surface.

How a Lenton driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Water and neighbours are the two things to settle before a machine starts. A front hardstanding on these streets falls to the pavement and the road, so slurry coming off a rotary cleaner has one obvious place to go and it is not an acceptable one. It gets swept and vacuumed as we work and the gully in the kerb line is covered rather than used. On a terrace the frontage often runs into next door's with no fence between them, so water crosses the boundary whatever anybody intends, which means telling the neighbour the day before instead of apologising afterwards. Cars have to be off, and on a permit street that needs a plan for where the car goes for the morning, agreed when you book. There has to be a working outside tap or a reachable internal one, since this equipment draws water continuously rather than off a tank. Early autumn suits the work better here than midsummer, because the surface has to dry properly before sand goes back into the joints and a shaded frontage under street trees takes its time about it.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly almost entirely Victorian and Edwardian terraces converted to shared houses, plus purpose-built student blocks along Derby Road, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Lenton on the same round as Radford, The Park Estate and Beeston.

What we check on every Lenton job

Three surfaces turn up on these frontages and they want three different approaches. Concrete blocks, which take a rotary cleaner at working pressure and then want kiln dried sand brushed back in over two or three passes rather than scattered once. Old pressed concrete slabs, frequently the original garden path relaid as parking, which are softer than they look and lose their face if a lance is held anywhere near them. And the passage between two houses, generally still the original quarry tile or engineering brick on a lime bed, which never sees sun, stays wet and grows a green film that is treacherous underfoot by January. That passage is a detergent and contact time job at low pressure, because water driven into a lime joint takes the joint with it. Around all of them sits a strip of loose gravel where the paving stops short of the wall, and that gets raked back before anything blows it into the border.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Before the water goes on: The surface identified: block paving, pressed concrete slab, natural stone, porcelain, imprinted concrete or tarmac, because pressure and chemistry both follow from that
• The clean: Rotary surface cleaner across the open area, which is what keeps every pass even
• Putting it back: Kiln-dried sand brushed into block paving joints once the surface has dried
• Before the water goes on: Imprinted concrete flagged as a sealer job rather than a jetting job, because what has failed there is the sealer coat, not the concrete under it

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.