Driveway & Patio Cleaning in The Meadows

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for The Meadows homes

Most addresses here have no drive. What there is to clean is a paved strip on the walkway side and a small yard behind, because the parking court surface belongs to whoever manages the estate rather than to any one household.

Start with what the ground actually is here, because it is rarely a driveway. On the walkway frontages there is a paved strip of pressed concrete flags in front of the door, a border, and the public footpath beyond that. Behind the house there is often a small yard, sometimes flagged and sometimes laid in block paving, gated onto a parking court. The court is the largest paved area in sight and the one nobody individually owns, since it was laid, drained and is maintained by whoever manages the estate. So the work splits into what is yours and what is not, and a quote here starts with that boundary rather than with the area. Toward Queens Drive the older terraces have proper yards behind them, usually a patchwork of periods laid one over another.

The Meadows sits in NG2, under Nottingham City Council. Regular domestic cleaning across the estate, a steady run of end of tenancy work because a large share of the stock is let, and window cleaning booked more often than the size of the houses would suggest, since ground floor glass sits at eye level on the walkways everybody uses to get home.

What we run into on The Meadows driveway & patio cleaning jobs

Pressed concrete flags are the surface most often damaged by being cleaned. What darkens them on a shaded walkway is algae rather than dirt, they hold it because the surface is porous, and it comes off easily. The temptation is to hold a lance close and watch the flag come up bright, which strips the fine laitance off the top and exposes the sand and stone underneath. It looks impressive for one season. After that the flag is rougher than it was, it holds water and soil where it used to shed them, and it greens over faster every year. We run a rotary at a set height and a pressure well below what the concrete would survive once.

How a The Meadows driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Everything about this job here comes back to water. There is no outside tap on most of these houses and no drive to stand a machine on, so the supply comes off your kitchen tap through a hose that has to reach whichever side is being cleaned. To a back yard that is usually simple enough. To a walkway frontage it means a hose crossing a public footpath, which we route tight against the wall and cover where it crosses, because the estate walks past all day and a hose lying on a footpath is a trip waiting to happen. The second half of it is where the water goes afterwards. A parking court falls to one gully, so slurry left to find its own way runs across other people's bays before it gets there, and a walkway falls toward the drainage in the paving rather than away from your door. We sweep and vacuum the slurry up rather than flushing it along, and the gully gets covered so grit does not go straight down it. Dry settled weather is worth waiting for, because in a wet week the surface never dries enough for the sand to go back in.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly low-rise redevelopment from the 1970s and 1980s, laid out around pedestrian walkways and rear parking courts, with older terraces surviving toward Queens Drive and flats and maisonettes near Bridgeway, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run The Meadows on the same round as Nottingham City Centre, Wilford and West Bridgford.

What we check on every The Meadows job

Thresholds are the thing to look at before any water goes on. Doors on this stock sit close to the level of the paving outside, with a shallow upstand at most and no step to speak of, which is fine until somebody points a lance at it. Water driven at a threshold that low goes under the door and into the hall, where the floor is solid and there is nothing beneath it to take the water away, so it sits in the covering and works sideways from there. We wash away from the door rather than toward it, tape the bottom edge where it needs taping, and keep the lance angle down. The same goes for an air brick low in a yard wall, and for the vent where somebody has cut one through for a tumble dryer. Anything that is a hole in a wall gets covered before we start rather than explained afterwards.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• The clean: Rotary surface cleaner across the open area, which is what keeps every pass even
• The clean: Lance work confined to edges, kerb lines, steps and the corners a rotary physically cannot reach
• The clean: Pressure and nozzle set to the surface, well down on sandstone, limestone and porcelain from what concrete takes
• The clean: Black spot lichen treated with a proprietary remover and dwell time, because pressure alone does not lift it and pressure hard enough to try will damage the slab

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.