Nobody can give you a real number for an Akron driveway without measuring it, and anybody who does is quoting a number that only moves one way afterwards. Here is what actually decides it, how to measure your own in about four minutes, and how to read a quote once you have one.
The quote that costs homeowners money is the one that arrives low and then grows. You agree a figure, the crew turns up, and there is a conversation on your driveway about extra material, or edging, or the cracks nobody counted. By then the truck is there and you are not really in a position to say no.
The alternative is to measure first and quote once. That is why we ask for an address before a price, and it means the number you are given is the number you pay. If the measurement is wrong, that is ours to absorb rather than a change order on the day.
Square footage is the biggest input by a distance and everything else adjusts around it. It is also the one number you can work out yourself before you speak to anyone, and it is worth doing.
Cracks are filled before anything else goes down, and they are measured and quoted by the linear foot, separately from the sealing. Sealer is roughly the thickness of a coat of paint. It will sink into an open crack and reappear as a line rather than close it, so filling is a different operation with a different material.
On Akron driveways this is routinely the larger half of the job, and that surprises people who have had it done elsewhere. Akron-Canton averages 47 inches of snow a year against Dayton's 12. Snow that falls gets salted, and chloride both holds moisture in the surface and works on the binder holding the stone together. Four months of that, every year, opens more crack than a mild winter does. A quote that does not break the crack work out as its own line is hiding the part of the job most likely to grow.
Old, oxidised, porous asphalt drinks noticeably more material than a surface that has been maintained. A drive that has not been touched in twelve years is not the same job as one sealed three years ago at the same size. This is the input that makes a sight-unseen quote unreliable, and it is why we look before we price.
Akron sits on the edge of the Allegheny Plateau and a great many driveways here run up or down a slope rather than across flat ground. That changes the work in two ways. Sealer has to be worked uphill so the wet edge is always being pushed into, which is slower than flat, and the low end of the drive is usually in worse condition than the top because water has been running down and standing there for years. Two drives of identical size can price differently for no reason other than the fall on them.
Plenty of Akron housing is older and closer together than the postwar subdivisions further south, particularly in the streets that went up around the rubber plants. Long narrow drives, tight gates, a garage at the back of the lot and borders that have to be cut in by hand all add time. The machine does the middle; the edges are where the hours go.
Pace the length and the width. A normal adult stride is close enough to three feet for this, and you are after a sensible figure rather than a survey. Length times width gives you the area. If the drive changes width, which most do at the apron, split it into two rectangles and add them together.
Then walk it once more and count the cracks, roughly, in feet. Not hairline surface checking, the ones you could lay a pencil in. That second number is the one that moves an Akron quote, and knowing it before you call means you can tell whether a quote is built on the same driveway you are standing on.
Bring both numbers to anybody you ask, including us. A contractor whose price does not respond to the crack figure is not pricing your driveway.
Sealer cut with water. The commonest one. A coat that has been thinned goes on easily, looks correct for about a month, and is gone by the second winter. In a market that puts four months of freeze and salt on a driveway there is nowhere for a thin coat to hide.
Cracks skipped. Going straight to sealing is faster and cheaper and it undoes itself. Water gets into the crack that was never filled, freezes, and opens it wider under the new coat.
Leftover material and a door knock. The trade has a long standing problem with crews working a street offering to use up what is on the truck. There is no warranty, no business to call afterwards, and usually no way to find them in spring.
A quote can be lower than another one for perfectly good reasons. What it cannot be is lower without saying which of these it is doing.
Sealing is a surface coat, so anything structural is a different job with a different trade. Potholes, alligator cracking where the base has gone, and the soft patch at the bottom of a sloped drive where water has collected for years are all repair work. A coat over them buys you until about February.
If that is what your driveway needs we will say so rather than take the job, because a driveway sealed over a failing base looks wrong within a year and the person who paid for it tells their street.
Commercial work is measured and quoted differently: area walked rather than taken off an aerial, crack filling separate, striping counted per stall and per marking, and the phasing priced because a lot that can close for two days costs less to seal than the same lot done in four evening sections.
How parking lots are quoted, phased and striped covers all of that, including what gets verified before a commercial job is booked.
Send the address. We measure the asphalt, usually from satellite imagery so nobody has to be home, and read what condition it is in. You get one number back covering the crack filling and one full strength coat, with the crack work shown as its own line so you can see what it is.
No charge for the quote, no visit you have to be in for, nobody knocking afterwards. If the answer is that your driveway does not need doing this year, that is a perfectly good answer and you will not hear from us again about it.
