Tarmac restoration in Ossett

Ossett is a small market town on a hill above the Calder valley, a few miles from Wakefield, and it is a place where people park cars. A good proportion of its housing is the kind that came with a drive for one car and now has to cope with two or three, and tarmac that was laid for one vehicle is a different proposition when it carries a family's worth.

We clean, recolour and seal tarmac driveways throughout Ossett and the WF5 postcodes. The work is mostly on ordinary family drives, and the question is almost always how the surface has been used rather than how old it is.

Where the wear actually shows

Look down a tarmac drive that has had two cars on it for ten years and you can read the household's habits. There are two pale tracks where the tyres run. There is a worn arc where the cars turn in, and a scuffed patch near the garage door where the steering has been turned on the spot. Between the tracks the centre strip is darker, because it is the part that has been shielded.

Turning a wheel while stationary is hard on tarmac, and on a warm day it is harder still, because the surface softens. That is where the aggregate gets scuffed out and the edges of the arc start to ravel. A coating will restore the colour across all of it, but the scuffed patch is a repair first. What recolouring actually does explains why the tracks fade first and what putting colour back changes.

Oil, and the spot it picks

Every car drips, and most of them drip in the same place, because that is where the engine sits when the car is parked. Over a few years the spot becomes a dark, soft patch with a pale halo around it, and the bitumen under it has been dissolved. A brush will not shift it and a coating will not hold on it.

Oil is treated and lifted before anything else goes on the surface. Deep staining can leave a shadow even after it has been treated, and we will say so rather than promise it will vanish. Cleaning is where the job starts, and tarmac cleaning covers what it does and what it leaves.

A hill town in the weather

Ossett stands on high ground above the river, and it is more exposed than the valley towns below it. The wind comes across it, the frosts come a little earlier, and a surface that is open to the sky does not stay damp the way a sheltered one does. That helps against moss, and it hurts against frost: a faded, open surface takes in water, and a hard freeze turns it into ice inside the tarmac.

The edges and the joints take the damage first. Where the drive meets the road or a kerb, or where it runs against a garage door or a wall, water gets in and the edge begins to crumble. Sealing closes the surface so that less water gets in, and our note on whether to seal a tarmac drive covers when it is worth it.

Stone, brick and bungalows

The housing mix is varied. The centre has stone terraces and older properties, and around it there are interwar and postwar semis, bungalows and a good deal of more recent building on cul-de-sacs. The closes are where we see the most identical drives, a row of the same width and the same age that fade together.

If you are a few years into a new build, your drive may be tarmac that is simply going grey ahead of schedule. If it is much older it is worth checking for the structure at the edges as well. Either way, how long tarmac lasts is a useful read before you decide what to do.

Working across Ossett

We cover the WF5 postcodes, including Gawthorpe, Flushdyke, Healey, Southdale and Ossett Green. The map on the contact page shows the area we serve. Horbury is the neighbouring town to the east, Dewsbury is to the west, and Wakefield, where we are based, is close by.