Concrete driveways and patios in Brookwood
Brookwood is brick ranches on lots larger than the downtown grid, most of them built in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Nearly every concrete job here is a replacement rather than a first pour, so removal at $2 to $6 per square foot is a real line on the quote rather than a footnote.
West-side city neighborhood of brick ranches on lots larger than the downtown grid, with mature trees. Driveways here are original to the house, so most work is replacement rather than first installation, and removal is a real line on the quote.
What makes concrete work in Brookwood different?
The age of what is already there.
Brookwood sits on the west side of the city, inside the city limits, and it is mostly brick ranches and traditional one and two storey houses on lots noticeably larger than the downtown grid. Mature trees, and Brookwood Park at the middle of it. The housing stock dates largely from the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Which means the driveways do too. A concrete driveway that has taken sixty winters in a climate with sixty to eighty freeze thaw cycles a year has reached the end of its life, and what we are asked for here is almost always a replacement.
That changes the shape of a quote. Removal runs two to six dollars a square foot on top of the new pour, and on a generous Brookwood driveway that is a substantial figure rather than a rounding error. It is also the item most often left out of a cheaper competing quote, which is worth checking before comparing two numbers.
What do the old driveways here tell us?
That the mix was never air entrained, and that the base was thin.
A sixty year old driveway that is flaking and losing its surface in sheets is scaling, and scaling happens when water in the surface pores freezes with nowhere to expand into. Air entrained concrete at four to seven percent air prevents it. Very little residential flatwork from that era had it.
The other thing the old slabs show is base depth. Where a driveway has cracked into panels that sit at different heights, the clay underneath moved and the base was too thin to stop it. Whitfield County red clay with chert and weathered shale through it does exactly that as it wets and dries.
Both are fixable, and the moment to fix them is while the old driveway is coming out. Four to six inches of compacted graded aggregate and an air entrained mix cost very little on top of a job that is already happening, and neither can be added later.
Do the driveway rules cause problems in Brookwood?
Less than in most of the city, because the frontages are wide.
The rule that bites hardest elsewhere is section 5-6-3, which allows only one combined entrance and exit where frontage is fifty feet or less. Brookwood lots are wider than that, so a second cut or a circular drive is available here in a way it is not in the mill village.
The five foot reserve in section 5-6-2 still applies. No part of an entrance may sit less than five feet inside the frontage boundaries, so the usable width is the frontage minus ten feet. On a wide Brookwood lot that is barely noticeable.
Corner lots are the exception worth checking. Section 5-6-5 keeps any part of a driveway at least twenty five feet back from the intersection of the right of way lines, and Brookwood has a fair number of corners.
Permits, if one is needed, go to Whitfield County Building Inspection on 706-275-7474, not to the city.