Axel Landscapes Serving the greater Minneapolis and St. Paul metro areas WINNER: 2007 MNLA Award for Residential Hardscape WINNER: 2005 Hedberg Award for Segmental Retaining Wall |
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Chris Axel's
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You will love your new Paver Driveway
Thanks for clicking! Paver projects are one of our specialties at Axel Landscapes. We won our first Hedberg Award in 2000 for a paver patio in Chanhassen. We also won our first MNLA award in 2004 for a patio in Eden Prairie, pictured below. Paver driveway pricing information is lower on this page. Paver patios and paver driveways have nearly the same installation process. The difference is that a paver patio requires a minimum of 4" of compacted base material, and a driveway requires at least 9", to handle the weight of cars and trucks. For patios, we use 6" of compacted base, and for driveways, we use a full 12". (We've done raised patios with as much as four feet of base underneath. You could drive a tank on those!)
HOW DO PAVER DRIVEWAYS COMPARE? Pavers: Flexible, Durable Surface, Invisible Repairs $12-18/s.f. (less if no tear-out.) A paver driveway, properly installed, will last much longer than either asphalt or concrete. We install paver driveways on a full 12" of compacted base material, ensuring that the driveway will never move. The pavers, either clay or concrete, are oven-cured and designed to withstand much more pressure than a car or truck would ever put on them. So both the base and the surface are solid and durable. Once a paver driveway is installed, it requires no further technical maintenance. Another great benefit to pavers is that any paver or group of pavers can always be removed and replaced, if necessary. In a disaster where you spill a large amount of something on your paver driveway and can't clean it off, it's actually quick and easy to remove and replace the damaged pavers. Clay pavers often have the same texture on the top and bottom, so they can simply be removed, turned upside-down, and replaced. Pavers have been used for thousands of years in Europe and around the world to pave roads. They are still widely used today. Hedberg Landscape Supply has pavers installed where 15-ton dump trucks drive over them every day. You can use your snowblower or have a snowplow company plow a paver driveway in the winter. They won't hurt it.
Flexible, Weak Surface, Visible Repairs $5.00-9.00/square foot <<source info>> Asphalt is a cheap product, designed to be inexpensive to install and repair. Asphalt is installed on 4-6" of compacted base material, which prevents movement. But it's not really enough base to be totally stable. Asphalt is soft and easily damaged, particularly during summer heat waves. It needs cracks and holes filled and to be resealed every couple of years to keep looking nice. Oil leaks can eat through asphalt, surprisingly. You save money up-front on the installation of an asphalt driveway, but if you want it to stay looking nice, you have to spend money on it most every year. I personally think that asphalt looks pretty nice when it's new, but give it 5 years of patching and sealcoating, and suddenly the paver driveway next door looks about 100 times better. The price range for asphalt is $5.00-9.00/square foot, depending on the experience of the contractor, the quality of asphalt they're using, and size of the job.
Concrete: Inflexible, Crack-Prone surface, Visible Repairs. $9.00-16.00 (regular poured slab) $14.00-20.00/s.f. (Stamped/tinted Concrete) Concrete, as we all know, starts off looking great, but cracks eventually. Sometimes this happens in the first year, sometimes it takes five years, but it will crack. The reason they make those cut lines in concrete is to try to make it crack in those lines instead of through the middle of the slab. But eventually it will crack in the middle, too. There is no way to patch it except to tear out the entire thing and start over with a new driveway. Concrete is totally inflexible. It can not bend with the freeze/thaw cycle, so every winter it develops new cracks. It is not installed over any compacted base material, so it received the full brunt of the frost every year. The surface of poured concrete is durable, but if you spill something uncleanable, you are stuck with it. There's no possible way to remove and replace a chunk without leaving a very obvious patch. Stamped concrete has the same drawbacks as regular concrete, and is more expensive than pavers. Stamped concrete looks good until the cracking starts, and no amount of rebar will prevent it. Concrete is too inflexible to stand our winters. Concrete pricing has risen in the last 5 years, due to the rising cost of concrete and the trucking charges to haul it. Nowadays concrete slabs and driveways are in the $9.00-15.00/s.f. range. This also depends on the quality of installation, how much rebar they use, how thick the slab will be, etc. We got four bids for a 1500 s.f. driveway in Southwest Minneapolis last year, and none were lower than $14.00/s.f. That was without tearout! Stamped concrete is $14.00-18.00/s.f.
We'd love it if you'd contact us for a free estimate, using the phone number or email link at the bottom of this page. Yes, even though we've been doing this for 10 years, we still give free estimates. We can give you a rough idea of price over the phone, if you like, or you can use the following very general price guidelines: Paver Driveways: No matter what size driveway or what paver you choose, it's unlikely you'll pay less than $12/square foot or more than $18/square foot. This price includes tearout and 12" of compacted base material under the pavers. For new construction homes, which have no driveway yet, it's possible to get under $12/s.f. Call for pricing. We use one of two asphalt companies to tear out the existing driveway, excavate down 12", haul away the dirt, and compact in 12" of base material. We hire them because they do this prep every single day for their own driveways, and all that's different working for us is they install a much thicker base. They have a steamroller the size of a pickup truck to compact the base, and when they're done, we KNOW the pavers are never going to move.
Paver driveways usually slope more than patios, and they handle a lot of water flow when it rains. So we like to use special "locking" sand, which glues itself in between the pavers and never washes out. If you've seen pavers with weeds growing in them, it's because the sand washed out of the joints over the course of several years, and the homeowners didn't sweep more in, allowing dirt to enter. Most paving contractors just use normal sand between the joints.
FINAL MESSAGE Look around our website, particularly the Recent Projects page or the Photo Gallery to see all the different things we can do. We love this work, and we're excited to share it with you! Enjoy a few more photos of paver projects below. Any of these pavers could be used for your driveway.
SOURCES FOR PRICING/DURABILITY COMPARISONS:
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© 2004 Axel Landscapes For info call us at 612-819-2828, or Email Us! Contact the Webmaster to report broken links |
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Asphalt:
We
provide you with a two-year craftsmanship warranty, just in case. In the
extremely rare case where a few pavers move, it's an easy fix to remove
them, add some base material, and replace them.
