If you have an existing driveway, then you need a professional to remove it, however if you feel confident enough to remove it yourself then you will find the following information useful.
If the existing driveway is tar or concrete, you are going to need excavation equipment and we recommend hiring a mini digger from a local tool hire company. You may also need a pneumatic drill or ‘jackhammer’ to break up the surface before collecting it in the digger.
Consider hiring a builders skip 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. Builder skips are around a R1000 a day in Durban - rubble removal
If the old driveway consists of slabs, flag stones or pavers - 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.
If the ground beneath your driveway is firm, you will need to take off at minimum, a further 20cm from the surface of the driveway to allow room for the 10cm of base core, 5cm of sand and finally, the height of the paving stone itself (usually 5cm). Please note, if the paving stone 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 sub-base core, applied and
compacted in layers of no more than 10cm thick.
This extra sub-base core will stabilize the surface
and compensate your driveway and reduce the
chance of your newly installed paving of
sinking.
