Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Sherwood

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Sherwood homes

Front gardens sit above the footway on a bank, so many of them are now block paved hardstandings with a dropped kerb, and everything the jetting lifts runs downhill onto the pavement unless it is caught.

The ground rises away from the footway on most of these streets, so a front garden here is a bank with steps up from the pavement and a path to the door. A fair number have been given over to a hardstanding, block paved, with a dropped kerb cut in, and they were laid on what was garden soil rather than on anything engineered. That is the first thing to establish, because a block drive on made ground settles into ruts under the wheel line and re-sanding a rutted drive tidies it without fixing it. The fall is the second thing. Everything a jet lifts wants to run downhill onto the footway, and the older houses still have the original tiled path beside it.

Sherwood sits in NG5, under Nottingham City Council. Professional households wanting a regular fortnightly clean, and a steady run of deep cleans in period houses where the annual jobs have been left a little too long.

What we run into on Sherwood driveway & patio cleaning jobs

That original path is the item to be careful with. Edwardian houses here kept a geometric tile path from the gate to the step, small unglazed tiles in red, buff and black set inside a border, bedded in lime mortar straight onto the ground. They are porous, the colour is in the body of the tile but the face has been worn smooth by a century of feet, and the joints between them are soft. A rotary head at working pressure lifts individual tiles clean off the bed, and an acidic brick cleaner leaves the reds looking chalky. Those get low pressure, a brush and a neutral detergent, and the missing tiles stay missing.

How a Sherwood driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

The pavement is the neighbour on this job. A front hardstanding on these streets opens straight onto a footway people use to reach the shops, so the working area has to be closed off, kept closed while the surface is wet, and reopened clean rather than left greasy. We take the front early in the day for that reason and leave the rear until the afternoon, which also gives a block drive the whole afternoon to dry before sand goes back into the joints. Water is the other thing to settle before the day. There is an outside tap on the back of most of these houses and the run to the front is long, so tell us whether it works and whether it has been turned off at a stopcock inside for the winter, because a dead tap discovered on arrival costs an hour. Where a drive is shared between a pair of semis, speak to the other household first. Half a shared drive cleaned and half left is a worse result than doing all of it or none of it, and as one booking it is a shorter job than two separate ones.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces and semis running off Mansfield Road, with larger detached houses toward Woodthorpe, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Sherwood on the same round as Mapperley, Arnold and New Basford.

What we check on every Sherwood job

The joints tell you the age of the work. On a hardstanding laid over the old front garden, the sand in the block joints has usually gone: washed out at the low edge by years of run off down the slope, and replaced at the top by moss and by soil that has crept in from whatever border was left. Where the sand has gone the blocks have nothing holding them against each other, so the wheel line spreads and the herringbone opens along its length. At the back it is a different problem. Patios here are commonly slabs laid tight against the back addition wall and sometimes sitting above the level of the damp course, so the wash is worked away from that wall rather than towards it and no lance goes into the joint at the bottom of it. Weeds in a mortar joint come out with a hand blade, since jetting a failed pointing simply finishes it off.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Before the water goes on: Gullies, air bricks and door thresholds covered, and the route the water will take worked out before it starts taking it
• 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
• Putting it back: Sealing quoted as a separate return visit on a properly dry surface, never the same day
• Putting it back: Kiln-dried sand brushed into block paving joints once the surface has dried

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.