Pneumatic drill breaking up a concrete driveway

If you have an existing drive installed, you may need a professional to remove it for you, however if you feel confident enough to remove it yourself then you may find the following information useful.

If the existing drive installation is concrete or tarmacadam, will are most likely going to need some excavation equipment and we reccommend hiring a mini digger from a loal hire company. You may also need a pneumatic drill or ‘jackhammer’ as its better known in the USA to break up the surface before collecting it in the digger.

You may also wish to hire a ‘builders skip’ from a skip hire company to load the debris from the old driveway into, when using a digger it makes the job a lot easier as you can dump the rubble directly into the skip from the digger.

If the old driveway consists of slabs, flag stones or block paving – then you may wish to remove them by hand, this will usually take longer but you will save on the hire of the digger and drill, the choice is yours!

If the ground beneath your driveway is firm, you will need to take off at minimum, a further 20cm or 8 inches from the surface of the drive to allow room for the 10cm of hardcore, 5cm of sand and finally, the height of the block paving itself (usually 5cm). Please note, if the block paving is higher than 5 cm you will need to deduct extra from the surface of the drive to accommodate the higher blocks.

If the surface beneath your existing driveway is not firm, then you will need to excavate more ground and replace it with extra hardcore, applied and compacted in layers of no more than 10cm thick. This extra hardcore will stabilise the surface and compensate your drive and reduce the chance of your newly installed block paving sinking.