Two Driveways

Every guide to having a driveway cleaned tells you to move your car so it does not get splashed. That is the visible half of the reason. A pressure washer throws a fine airborne mist well past the edge of whatever is being washed, and where a treatment is in use, that mist is carrying chemistry with it. UK guidance for hypochlorite on hard surfaces is explicit about keeping overspray off planting, metal fixtures and paintwork. Splashing is the least of it.

This job was quoted as one driveway. Two properties, block paved, laid as a single continuous field with nothing between them — no kerb, no step, no change of level to say where one ended and the other started. From the road it reads as one surface, and that is exactly the problem, because a surface that reads as one cannot be cleaned as a half without the join announcing itself afterwards.

So the conversation happens before the quote is written, not after the machine is packed away. We walk the boundary and agree where the line would fall — the actual course it would take across the blocks — and the customer gets to look at it and decide. Some are content with a line. Most are not, once they have seen where it lands. Either answer is a fine answer. What is not fine is finding out afterwards.

Then we speak to the neighbour, whether or not there is any prospect of work in it. Partly because they are entitled to know that somebody will be running a petrol machine a few feet from their front door for most of a day. Partly because their car is going to need moving. And partly because a boundary line drawn by a stranger with a pressure washer is the sort of thing people would rather be told about than discover.

About nine times in ten that goes well, and a fair number of those it turns into a second job, which is what happened here. The tenth time somebody gets a bit short with the neighbour who booked the clean, because now they are shifting a car on a Friday afternoon for a job that is not theirs. That is not a reason to skip the conversation. It is just what neighbours are.

The photograph at the top of this page is not a result. It is treatment sitting on the surface, halfway through the day, which is the stage nobody publishes because it does not look like anything yet. It matters because it is the only part of the sequence that tells you what actually did the work. A before and an after together prove that a change occurred. They do not tell you whether it came from chemistry or from pressure.

The work itself was not complicated and there is no point dressing it up. Debris off, planting soaked with clean water so nothing arrived dry at a treated surface, treatment across the field and left to dwell, then the rotary cleaner over the open area with the lance held back for the kerb line, the edges and the returns. Joints refilled once the blocks had dried through. All of it twice over, because there were two drives.

What you can see in the last photograph is the time. It is late evening and the light has gone warm, which is the sun setting at the far end of a June day, not a filter and not a chosen hour. The photographs run from mid-afternoon, through treatment, to sunset, and that span is the honest length of the thing. Two drives is the best part of a day. It was never going to be an hour.