The Brew Cabin

Hi
I am making plans to block pave my driveway and have a couple of questions about removing the old driveway. At the minute it looks like it is concrete with tarmac on top so I am going to remove the lot down to 200mm - as the drive runs between two houses am I goint to have problems removing material near the house walls.
Also I there is a concrete step upto my backdoor from the drive, would I have a problem removing this and creating block paved steps?

Congratulations on a great site.

Thanks

The short answers are no and no.

The existing concrete drive, even if it is overlaid with bitmac, won't be attached to the house, or at least, not in any truly structural way, so you shouldn't have any problems, other than the usual backache and blistered mitts, when it comes to breaking it all out.

The same goes for the step - it should more or less fall out when you take up the rest of the driveway concrete, and so there's no problem in creating a new step to suit your taste.

How're you going to break out the concrete?

Not really sure about how im going to break up the concrete. I am going to block pave the pad infront of my garage first (before attempting the long drive) so was going to hire a breaker of some sort. Can you advise the best route??

Also regarding drainage my drive way is about 60 square metres (approx 3metres wide). Do i need to camber the drive between the two houses , either to the center or the edges and pick up the rain, or can I use the natural slope that it has and pick up the run off at the end.
As the drive has two seperate inclines, I was initially thinking of having a channel at the foor of the first incline leading into channels down each side of the houses and running into a gully at the end of the drive???

Thanks

If you're only breaking out a small area, one of the lecky breakers you can get from more or less any Hire Shop, but for a 60m² area, a proper compressor and Jack-hammer (aka The Irish Motorbike) is the tool you need. Use the point (one of the 3 types of drift supplied with breakers - the other 2 being a chisel and a tramac cutter) to break throiugh the concrete and keep trying to force back the hammer as you drill, so that you're applying a levering force at the same time as a hammering force.

Don't worry about cambering a driveway that's only 3m wide, if it has sufficient endfall. Rather than channel the collected surface water back along the house, would it not be easier to intsall a new gully at the low point and connect that up to the SW system? It'd certainly look tidier!

Or, rather than install a new gully, you could simply install a length or three of linear drain and connect that to the SW system via pipework.

Thank you very much for youy time - youve been a great help.

Just to confirm, when you say have a gully or linear drain at the low point - is this referring to the bottom of the incline eg my drive runs "downhill" from the road to my garage, so id have the linear drain at the garage end so the rain runs down the incline into it?

Thanks again - you'll probably see me posting in the site works section next with a question about building a wall.

Yes - install the drain at the bottom of the slope so that it collects up all the surface water which runs down the driveway.

I don't like to position linear drains right up against a garage or similar threshold - it's best if you lay a course of blocks up against the garage base, and angle them so that they fall away from the garage by around 15-20mm over the length of a single block. Then lay the linear drain against these blocks. The advantage to this layout is that, if you get a sudden and heavy surge of surface water heading down the drive, it is less likely to wash over the linear drain and get into the garage itself.