When we think about curb appeal, many homeowners tend to think about the more obvious things, like green spaces, planting, and the condition of our homes. But there’s something else that can go a long way toward enhancing curb appeal and making your home more welcoming whether you aim to sell or you’re looking to stay put for many more years: your driveway. Unit Paving Inc. can help you design and install a driveway that provides a subtle but important finishing touch to your home’s overall look.
Driveway Design Considerations
You may have any number of reasons for replacing your current driveway. It may be old and worn. It may clash with a recent remodel. Or maybe it’s simply time for something that refreshes the look of your property. Regardless of your motives, there are a number of driveway design considerations that influence how Unit Paving approaches your hardscaping project.
Site
The location of your property relative to local roads, traffic patterns, the distance from the front of your property to your home, road grading, and drainage all influence the configuration of your driveway. Your options can sometimes be limited by a smaller property, a home with a carport or a garage built in, or a property with irregular topography. Even a larger property with the home or place of business significantly set back from the road can be either an opportunity or a challenge depending on how you approach it.
Size
A family parking multiple cars, or hosting lots of gatherings, has different needs than a couple of empty-nesters who keep their vehicles in a garage. Likewise, the approach to a smaller home will be different than the design for a sprawling ranch, a mixed-use building, or a municipal parking lot.
Surroundings
A Craftsman bungalow on the outskirts of Durham uses a different style and different materials than a beach house in the Outer Banks. They, in turn, will have different requirements than a commercial complex or office park in Raleigh. Good design accounts for differing architectural styles, different landscaping, and even the other structures in the neighborhood, so you can always blend in (or stand out) as much as you’d like.
Materials
Asphalt and concrete remain popular choices for driveways even though they require extensive site preparation, lots of equipment, and are very labor-intensive. Concrete pavers are gaining in popularity for their looks, their practicality, and comparably low expense, but even within the realm of pavers there are many different styles and sizes of materials available. We can help cut your choices down to size by eliminating options that won’t work as well given your stylistic aims, your drainage needs, and the property on which the driveway will be built. Additionally, we take care to plan the project and do the proper site preparations to ensure that our concrete pavers can take the same loads — and the same punishment — as their asphalt or concrete counterparts.
Style and Design
Now that you’ve taken all of the above into consideration, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. The ways in which to approach hardscape design — even if it’s something relatively straightforward like a driveway built of concrete pavers — aren’t always so simple as to be self-evident. Making choices in a way that balance form, function, and style require a discerning eye, a firm knowledge of engineering and materials, and enough experience to know what will work best to suit your needs and taste.
Getting Started
For all the complexity of hardscaping design, home and business owners in the Carolinas have long known that Unit Paving Inc is a reliable partner for their projects. Our extensive experience, our skilled workers, and our artistic eye have resulted in driveway and hardscape designs as beautiful as they are practical. To get started, call Unit Paving at (704) 412-4463 today.