Your Pakenham driveway, day by day: what actually happens on your street

Stage by stage on a 60 square metre Pakenham driveway

This is the real schedule for a standard replacement on a Class M site with reasonable truck access. A bigger driveway adds base and pour time rather than extra stages. Rain, a Class H soil upgrade or a crossover permit are the three things that move the dates.

Timings for a standard 60 square metre replacement in Pakenham, Officer or Cardinia Lakes. Asphalt is faster at 2 to 3 days on site with no cure period; see asphalt driveways. Bond return timing sits with the Shire, and the process is set out on the Cardinia permit page.

Access, noise, dust and the rest of real life

Access and parking

A loaded concrete agitator carries 6 to 8 cubic metres and weighs around 30 tonnes. It needs a clear run to the frontage, roughly 3.5 metres of width and about 4.5 metres of height clearance for the chute to swing. In the newer Pakenham East, Officer and Cardinia Lakes streets the kerbs are narrow and the nature strips are soft in winter, so the truck stays on the road and we run the chute or a pump. If the pour is at the rear or the fall is wrong for a chute, a line pump costs $480 to $880 and adds an hour. We work that out at the site visit, not on the morning.

The parking arithmetic catches people out. You lose the driveway from 7am on day 1 and you do not get it back for a car until 7 days after the pour, so about 11 days all up. Two cars on the street for a week and a half is manageable in older Pakenham and Beaconsfield streets and much harder in the new estates where every house has visitors parked out the front. Ask a neighbour early rather than on the morning.

Power, water and the tap you forgot

We need a garden tap that actually runs. Between wetting the base, wet cutting the joints and washing off the exposed aggregate retarder, a typical job uses 200 to 400 litres. If your only outside tap is on the wrong side of the house, tell us and we will bring a tank. A 10 amp external power point is useful but not essential; most of our gear is petrol or battery. If neither exists we bring a generator, which is one more thing making noise on the day.

Noise, and when

Demolition day is genuinely loud: an excavator and a jackhammer breaking a reinforced slab sit around 85 to 100 decibels at a few metres, on and off for most of the day. Base compaction on day 2 is a steady thump rather than a crack. Formwork day is quiet. Pour day is trucks arriving and a power float, which is more of a drone. The single sharpest noise is the concrete saw the morning after the pour, and it lasts 30 to 60 minutes. EPA Victoria's residential noise rules treat construction noise outside 7am to 6pm weekdays and 7am to 1pm Saturday, and any noise on Sundays or public holidays, as unreasonable. We work inside that window, and we let the immediate neighbours know before demolition day rather than after.

Dust and smell

Demolition makes dust even with water running on the breaker, so close the windows on that side and bring the washing in. Saw cutting is a wet cut, so it makes grey slurry rather than dust, and that slurry is strongly alkaline: it gets hosed to a settlement point and never into the stormwater pit, which matters both environmentally and legally. Concrete itself has almost no smell. What you will notice is the surface retarder on an exposed aggregate job and the sealer at day 8, both of which are solvent based and noticeable for 24 to 48 hours. Asphalt is the strong one: fresh hotmix smells of bitumen for two to three days and the smell carries into a house on a warm afternoon.

Pets, kids and working from home

Wet concrete has a pH around 12 to 13. It burns skin on contact and it burns a dog's paws quickly, and the dog will not tell you until the damage is done. Keep animals inside or off site on pour day, and remember that a gate that has been open all day is a gate a dog will find. Paw prints in a fresh slab are not a charming feature: fixing them properly means grinding and patching at $600 to $1,500, or repouring the panel. Children are the same story with the addition of an excavator and a saw on site.

If you work from home, plan around two blocks: all of demolition day and the 30 to 60 minutes of saw cutting the morning after the pour. Formwork day and cure days are quiet enough to take calls. If you have a fixed meeting you cannot move, tell us and we will sequence the noisy work around it where we can.

Weather, and what a delay actually costs you

Three weather rules decide whether we pour. No pour when the overnight forecast is below 5 degrees C, because frost on a green slab scales the surface. No pour when rain is likely in the 4 to 6 hours after placement, because rain on fresh concrete damages the finish permanently and there is no repair short of grinding or repouring. On days over 32 degrees C we start at first light and use an evaporative retarder so the surface does not skin before it can be finished. In a Cardinia winter, expect roughly one job in three or four to get postponed at least once. A postponement usually costs a few days rather than a few weeks, because the base and formwork stay in place and we simply rebook the concrete. If you want the best odds on a clean run, the best time to pour in Cardinia page compares the months.

What a clean site looks like at the end

Forms stripped and removed, not stacked behind the shed. Mesh offcuts and tie wire picked up, because they end up in mower blades and dog paws. Spoil and broken concrete gone rather than heaped on the nature strip. Slurry cleaned off the kerb and the footpath. Turf edges reinstated where the machine tracked, and the letterbox back where it started. We photograph the finished job the same day, and we would rather you walked it with us and pointed at something than found it a week later. The last thing you should get is paperwork: the invoice with the ABN, the warranty terms, the concrete docket and a one page note on curing and resealing.

Where the waste goes

Broken concrete from a 60 square metre driveway is roughly 9 to 12 tonnes. It goes to a construction and demolition recycler where it is crushed into road base, which is the same product that goes back under the next driveway. It is not hard waste and Cardinia Shire kerbside collection will not take it, so anyone quoting to leave it in a pile for you to deal with is handing you a real cost. Excavated clay, usually 6 to 9 cubic metres, goes to a clean fill site. Steel mesh offcuts go to scrap. All of it should appear as a disposal line on your quote, and if it does not, ask where it is going, because that is one of the classic omissions covered on the budget driveway page and in comparing driveway quotes.

The honest bit: sometimes the answer is do not start

If your driveway is structurally sound and just tired, we will say so and quote resurfacing instead, which is two days on site rather than four and no demolition at all. If you are selling in eight weeks, a full replacement plus a 28 day cure is a tight run and a pressure clean and reseal may serve you better. And if the crossover permit has not come back from the Shire, we will not start the driveway and hope, because a crossover poured without approval can be ordered out at your cost. What happens after the job, and what is covered if something does go wrong, is set out on driveway warranties in Victoria, and the specification we will be building to is explained on choosing a surface for Cardinia clay.