Driveway Paving in Kirkland, WA

By intercepting it before it arrives rather than dealing with it at the door. On a drive that falls from the street to a garage, the whole surface is a catchment delivering water to the lowest point, so a drain at the threshold has to handle everything at once. Breaking the run up works better: a cross-drain partway down that takes a share of the flow, a cross-fall that sheds water sideways into planting rather than letting it run the full length, and then a channel drain short of the garage for the remainder. All of it needs somewhere real to discharge.

Something with texture, and this is one of the few cases where traction should outrank appearance. A smooth-finish concrete or a large-format smooth paver on a genuine incline gets noticeably slippery in a wet Kirkland winter, both underfoot and occasionally under tyres. Textured pavers, a broom or exposed-aggregate finish on concrete, or asphalt all perform better on a slope. It is worth walking a sample in the wet rather than choosing from a dry showroom board, because the difference is significant and not obvious from a photograph.

Sometimes, and the constraints are usually the boundary and the grade rather than the paving. On the older streets close to the water, lots are narrow and a drive frequently sits between the house and a property line with very little to spare — so widening may mean cutting into a slope and retaining it, which turns a surfacing job into a structural one. It is often achievable and it is rarely cheap. We look at what the ground either side of the existing drive is doing before saying whether it is worth it.

Because that is where the stress concentrates and it is a very common failure on Kirkland gradients. Where a drive transitions from one slope to another — the crest at the street, or the flattening out at the garage — the slab is subject to bending in a way a uniform run is not, and concrete has almost no tolerance for that. Proper jointing at the transition controls where it cracks rather than whether it does. On a drive with multiple slope changes, pavers avoid the problem entirely because the surface is articulated by design.