Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Mapperley Park

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Mapperley Park homes

Barely any block paving here, so the re-sanding that is the point of this job elsewhere mostly does not apply. What there is instead is gravel, a tessellated path from the gate, stone flags at the back and lime mortar under most of it.

Four surfaces, and only one of them takes a machine at full pressure. The drive is gravel far more often than it is block paving, and gravel is not a surface you wash: a lance throws it into the border and drives the fines down into the sub base. From the gate to the porch runs a tessellated path of small unglazed clay tiles bedded and pointed in lime. At the back there are usually stone flags on a lime bed with the joints already open. Concrete appears only where a garage was added later, and that is the piece a rotary cleaner is actually for. So the re-sanding step that makes this service elsewhere hardly features, and most of the work here is a brush, a neutral cleaner and dwell time.

Mapperley Park sits in NG3, under Nottingham City Council. Regular domestic help in houses nobody can keep on top of around a working week, usually a longer visit less often rather than a short weekly one. Deep cleans before Christmas and in early spring. Carpet and upholstery work runs high, because two flights of stairs and rooms of this size take the wear a whole terrace would spread out.

What we run into on Mapperley Park driveway & patio cleaning jobs

The gully at the foot of the drive tells you what has been going on. Most of these plots fall from the house down towards the gate, and everything the gravel sheds ends up at a cast iron grating set into the kerb line or the edge of the tile, which is usually half filled with washed down fines and grit. Anything cleaned uphill of it sends its slurry to the same place, so the grating is lifted and cleared before we start and again before we leave. Where the fall runs the other way, back towards the house, the water heads for the air bricks along the front wall, and those get covered before a machine is switched on.

How a Mapperley Park driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Water and access are the two things to settle before a date is agreed. We can work off the vehicle tank, though an outside tap makes a long frontage considerably quicker, and on these plots the run from the gate to a rear terrace is long enough that hose length is a real consideration. Cars have to be off the drive for the day and, where the drive is shared between flats, that means every car rather than yours, so it is worth agreeing the day with whoever else uses it before booking. Planting is the other constant. Box hedging, established shrubs under the bays and pots along a terrace all get sheeted, and anything in a pot is better moved than covered. We collect the slurry rather than flushing it, because on a plot that falls towards a boundary the alternative is somebody else's border. Spring is the right time: the growth has had all winter to establish and a surface cleaned in March stays presentable through the months you actually sit out on it. Book it around exterior photographs if the house is going on the market.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly large late-Victorian and Edwardian villas on wide plots, red brick with stone dressings and deep bays, a good number now divided into flats, and almost nothing built small, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Mapperley Park on the same round as Mapperley, Sherwood and St Ann's.

What we check on every Mapperley Park job

The path from the gate is what decides how a house here reads from the pavement, and it is usually already damaged. It is a geometric floor of small unglazed clay tiles in buff, red, black and white, laid on a lime bed with joints only a couple of millimetres wide, and each piece is often no more than a centimetre thick. Somebody has almost always taken a lance to it at some point, and where that happened the pointing has gone, the tile edges are chipped and a few pieces rock underfoot. Water then gets beneath them and the first hard frost lifts more. What works is a stiff brush, a neutral cleaner, real dwell time and a rinse at garden hose pressure, worked in sections so nothing sits wet for long. It takes considerably longer than a machine would, and it is the only approach that leaves the path in one piece afterwards.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Before the water goes on: Cars, bins and furniture moved off, planting and painted timber sheeted
• The clean: Oil, tyre scuff and leaf tannin staining worked separately, since they are chemistry problems rather than soil
• Putting it back: Drainage channels and gully gratings cleared of what came off the paving
• Before the water goes on: A test patch in a low visibility corner on any stone we have not worked on before

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.