The Definitive Guide to Limestone Paving and a Superior Alternative
From the pyramids of Egypt to the White House and the Empire State Building, limestone has been used by architects and builders for some of the world’s most distinguished structures.
While you may not want your home to be a tourist attraction, you may be interested in the elevated aesthetic that natural limestone paving can provide.
What exactly is limestone paving? How is it installed? Is it expensive, and is it durable? Are there any practical alternatives to limestone paving? It is essential to consider all these factors to determine if limestone paving is suitable for your family’s home.
What is Limestone Paving?
Limestone is a type of sedimentary rock predominantly found in France, the UK, Ireland, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, Tunisia, Inda, and portions of the U.S.
Making up about ten percent of the world’s sedimentary rock, limestone is found in a wide range of colors, from blues and grays to reds and tans, greens, and beige.
Limestone is available in various sizes, shapes, textures, and finishes, but the style preferred for limestone paving is typically flat, with a light to moderate surface texture.
How to Install Limestone Paving
The process of installing natural limestone paving is similar to the installation of brick and concrete paver patios and driveways. However, unlike the uniform and predictable shape and size of bricks and pavers, natural limestone can often be irregular and will require more labor-intensive installation.
Subgrade and Prep
As with any patio or driveway, the subgrade should be excavated and backfilled with gravel and stone dust or sand.
Your subgrade should be sloping away from your house to avoid pooling and water damage around your home.
Once appropriately graded and filled, you should compact your subgrade with a plate compactor until it is firm and well-settled.
Laying the Limestone Paving
If your limestone has been refined into squares or rectangles and is regular in shape and size, you can lay your limestone as you would any brick or concrete paver. Use string lines and spacers to maintain a consistent layout and joint size.
If your limestone is irregular, your layout will be a more tedious and artistic affair.
Using a hammer, chisel, and gas-powered stone saw with a diamond blade, you will need to cut, modify and refine your pieces of limestone to fit together nicely.
Finishing Touches
Once you have laid and stabilized all of your limestone, you will need to pour and sweep stone dust, sand, or polymeric dust into all of the gaps between your stones. This filling acts similarly to the grout between tiles.
Sand and stone dust allow flexibility between your pieces of limestone, but may occasionally need to be replenished as the fine particles spill out over time.
Polymeric dust is a type of stone dust modified with a binding agent. Once swept into the cracks between stones and meticulously cleaned off the surface of your limestone, you need to spray or sprinkle water into the now dust-filled cracks. The polymeric dust will then harden and form a durable concrete-like material. This grout style will not spill out of the cracks and joints between your limestone, but it will crack if your driveway or patio experiences significant movement.
Pros and Cons of Limestone Paving
As with any building product, limestone paving has several significant pros and cons:
Pros of Limestone Paving
Some of the benefits of limestone paving include the following:
- Natural Beauty – It’s hard to argue against the natural beauty of limestone paving. As a building material that has been used for thousands of years, its visual appeal is time-tested and proven.
- Variety of Shapes, Sizes, and Colors – Limestone is available in regular and irregular shapes and sizes and a wide range of colors and marbling patterns.
- Insulative Properties – Limestone will not be too hot underfoot in the sweltering summer heat, nor will it be too cold to the touch during the chilly winter months.
Cons of Limestone Paving
- Cost – Limestone can be extremely expensive, and can sometimes cost as much as $40 per square foot.
- Weight – Limestone is extremely heavy, which can make transportation and installation more difficult.
- Tedious Installation – Between its hefty weight and the laborious installation process, limestone paving can be expensive and time-consuming to install.
Using Permeable Pavers as a Practical and Cost-Effective Alternative to Limestone Paving
If beautiful and long-lasting natural driveways and patios are what you desire, permeable pavers can be a significantly cheaper, easier, and more environmentally-friendly option than limestone.
Permeable pavers are recycled plastic interlocking grids that, once installed, can be filled with gravel or planted with grass.
By supplementing gravel or grass with the engineered, durable structure of permeable pavers, you can completely eliminate ruts and protect your grass’s delicate roots from being crushed by vehicle weight.
Driveways, patios, walkways, and parking lots built with permeable pavers allow 100% of stormwater and runoff to replenish vital groundwater supplies, and they require minimal maintenance.
Permeable pavers are significantly more affordable than limestone paving.
Able to be installed by any motivated homeowner or DIYer, permeable pavers are affordable, lightweight, and easy to install, to reduce the time and labor costs that can quickly add up with limestone paving.
Create Naturally Beautiful and Environmentally-Friendly Outdoor Spaces with TRUEGRID
If you want to create a naturally beautiful outdoor space without the staggering costs or tedious installation of limestone paving, then TRUEGRID has you covered.
TRUEGRID has made 100% of its environmentally-friendly paving alternatives in the U.S. from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE since 2013.
Offering a full range of products capable of creating beautifully green patios and walkways to indestructible industrial gravel parking lots, TRUEGRID has a product for all of your needs.
Visit TRUEGRID online to find a product that’s right for you, or get an estimate and discover how you can be true to your project and true to the environment with TRUEGRID!
Residential asphalt paving has long been the standard for driveways in neighborhoods across the country. Does the fact that we have used something for a long time mean it is the best option though?
What are the benefits of using asphalt on your family’s driveway? What factors should you consider before installing asphalt paving? Are there any alternatives?
It is essential to consider all of the factors and information before building a driveway that will be a distinguishing feature in your home’s legacy for the foreseeable future.
What is Residential Asphalt Paving?
Asphalt is one of the most commonly used materials for parking lots, driveways, highways, roads, and schoolyards.
Commonly referred to as “blacktop,” asphalt is a sticky substance derived from crude oil that is combined with sand, gravel, or other aggregates to create a durable surfacing material.
Residential asphalt paving is simply a blend of asphalt used for residential applications like driveways.
Types of Asphalt Paving
There are three basic types of asphalt; hot mix, warm mix, and cold mix. Each blend has its own unique strengths and weaknesses that are best suited for specific purposes.
Hot Mix Asphalt
Often referred to as HMA, hot mix asphalt is one of the most commonly used varieties of asphalt.
HMA is heated to and poured at temperatures between 300 and 350 degrees and is favored by paving professionals for its superior water resistance and durability.
Due to its tendency to cool rapidly, you should only use hot mix asphalt when air temperatures are consistently above forty degrees.
Warm Mix Asphalt
Warm mix asphalt is similar to hot mix, but is only heated to temperatures between 200 and 250 degrees. Although these lower temperatures decrease production costs, warm mix asphalt requires additional binding agents to be poured and spread at the lower temperatures.
Cold Mix Asphalt
As the name implies, cold mix asphalt does not require any heat; but it does make it substantially weaker than its heated counterparts.
Its ease of application and comparative weakness make cold mix asphalt a poor choice for large-scale projects, but an excellent choice for repairing potholes and other small-batch applications.
What Are the Benefits of Residential Asphalt Paving?
Affordability
Compared to other common driveway materials like concrete, brick, and concrete pavers, asphalt costs much less to create a dependable, long-lasting driveway.
Ease of Installation
Concrete requires hours of building forms and laborious finish work, while brick, cobblestones, and pavers require tedious and painstaking installation. Asphalt application is much less labor-intensive than its counterparts, which saves time and money.
Durability
Due to asphalt’s ability to bend and flex above 40 degrees, residential asphalt paving can withstand significant subsurface movement, to create a durable driveway surface that can last up to twenty years.
Factors to Consider Before Starting a Residential Asphalt Paving Project
Although there is much to love regarding residential asphalt paving, it is essential to consider all the factors to ensure it is suitable for your family’s home.
Climate and Weather Conditions
Although it can sustain minimal movement in warmer temperatures, residential asphalt paving is still susceptible to cracking in colder climates.
If you live somewhere prone to bouts of below-freezing weather and frost heaving, your asphalt driveway could develop cracks and splits.
Legal Requirements and Permits
Many cities require a certain percentage of your property to be permeable, in order to allow vital stormwater and runoff to replenish groundwater supplies.
Asphalt is not porous and will not meet permeability requirements.
Long-Term Maintenance
Although very durable, you must resurface residential asphalt paving at least every twenty years.
If you live in a below-freezing climate that is susceptible to frost heaving, you can expect your asphalt to split and crack, which requires annual maintenance.
Alternatives to Residential Asphalt Paving
Asphalt driveways are very common, but there are other viable options for a residential driveway. Concrete, brick, and permeable pavers can also provide excellent driveways for your home.
Concrete
A centuries-old technology, concrete has been used to create beautiful and durable driveways worldwide.
Although concrete can be an excellent residential driveway material, it does have some notable drawbacks.
Concrete offers no flexibility and often cracks and fractures. Once broken, concrete is very difficult to repair in an aesthetically pleasing way, which frequently makes removal and replacement the only suitable solution.
Concrete driveways can be a labor-intensive product; from building forms to properly pouring and finishing the end product, the manpower and labor costs of concrete work can be staggering.
Brick
A brick driveway can add stunning, rustic charm to any home, but it’s not always practical or affordable.
Between meticulously leveling the subgrade and tediously hand-setting each brick, the labor costs of giving your home a brick driveway can be astounding.
Add in the price of bricks, and this style of driveway can quickly become unaffordable for any homeowner.
Permeable Pavers
Permeable pavers are an incredible alternative to traditional residential asphalt paving.
Made of an interlocking plastic grid, you can easily install permeable pavers as a motivated homeowner or DIYer.
Able to be filled with either grass or gravel, permeable pavers protect delicate roots from being crushed under the weight of vehicles and hold gravel firmly in place to prevent ruts and spillage.
Unlike concrete and asphalt that break and crack with frost-heaving, permeable pavers are immune to cracks and damage caused by inclement weather.
Live in a city with a permeability ordinance? Permeable pavers are an easy way to create beautiful, long-lasting driveways that are 100% permeable. Many municipalities have tax incentives or rebate programs for replacing impermeable driveways with permeable pavement.
Craft Beautiful, Eco-Friendly Residential Driveways with TRUEGRID
Dedicated to creating environmentally friendly alternatives to asphalt and concrete, TRUEGRID has been manufacturing their innovative products, 100% made in the USA from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE since 2013.
Offering a full line of products for every need, TRUEGRID has precisely what you need to build a beautiful and durable driveway, while also keeping millions of pounds of plastics out of our landfills and oceans.
Choose from the PRO LITE for grass or gravel driveways, PRO PLUS for industrial-grade parking lots and roads, or ROOT for easy, stable grass paving.
Visit TRUEGRID today for an online estimate and learn how to be true to your project and true to the environment with TRUEGRID.
If traditional landscape fabric isn’t quite meeting your needs, or you would prefer to use a more natural and organic option, there are a wide variety of alternative landscaping fabric options to choose from.
What is Landscape Fabric?
Landscape fabric typically refers to a black or grey geotextile fabric that comes on a roll. This fabric prevents light from nourishing undesirable plant growth and prevents airborne seeds from infiltrating the fertile soil while still being porous enough to allow passage for air and water.
The two primary purposes for using landscape fabric are,
- Preventing weed growth
- Preventing soil erosion
How to Use Landscape Fabric
Using Landscape fabric can be a simple and effective measure in the battle against weeds and erosion.
- Place enough landscape fabric on top of your garden to effectively cover your entire planting area.
- Secure your fabric with stakes, staples, or other appropriate fasteners.
- Cut out holes where you plan on planting your starters and seedlings.
- Plant starters and seedlings in their corresponding holes.
How Does Landscape Fabric Work?
Landscape fabric prevents weed growth by physically preventing sunlight from reaching and nourishing unwanted plants. By only allowing the plants that you have specifically planted to penetrate the material, you should be able to eliminate most, if not all, weeds.
You can also use landscape fabric to help prevent erosion.
Landscape fabric is often secured over large embankments, near water, or across sloping grades to help reduce the amount of water saturated into the ground, potentially decreasing erosion.
Landscape Fabric Alternatives
Before we had the geotextile fabric we know today, gardeners, farmers, and other agriculturalists used many early organic landscape fabric alternatives to help prevent weeds from compromising their crops.
Cardboard
You probably have a stack of cardboard piling up in your garage, patiently waiting for you to take it to your local recycling center. Put that cardboard to work as a cheap landscape fabric alternative instead!
Although cardboard will not help prevent erosion, nor will it last you years of use, it can provide a formidable barrier to weeds and a delicious meal for worms as it decomposes.
Burlap
Burlap is the alternative landscape fabric most similar to the geotextile we often see today.
Although not as cheap as old cardboard, burlap can be significantly more affordable than modern landscape fabrics and an equally effective measure against weeds.
Installing it in multiple layers can protect your garden while also providing nutrients to the microorganisms in your soil as it decomposes.
Some people use burlap for temporary erosion control, but as it becomes saturated, it deteriorates, leaving the soil to run free once more.
Bark Mulch
Bark mulch is a terrific alternative to landscaping fabric and can be purchased affordably by the bag at most local hardware stores.
Bark mulch effectively retains moisture and helps to regulate soil temperature.
If you are considering using bark mulch, be sure it does not contain any dyes; these can harm the vital microorganisms in your soil.
You should also note that bark mulch can sometimes harbor common garden pests like slugs and snails, so keep an eye out!
Ground Cover Plants
Ground cover plants are just about the most organic and natural alternatives to landscape fabric possible.
These dense, low-to-the-ground plants effectively block weeds from receiving sunlight without interfering with your other plants.
The downside is that if you need to cover a large area, covering your garden in ground cover plants can get expensive quickly.
Using Permeable Pavers as Alternatives to Landscaping Fabric
Permeable pavers can be used as an alternative to landscaping fabric or, in addition to it, for an incredibly effective method of weed and erosion control.
Permeable pavers are plastic interlocking grids that can quickly be snapped together and secured in place by motivated homeowners and gardeners alike. Once connected, you can fill permeable pavers with gravel, grass, or mulch to create weed control that won’t spill out of your well-kept garden.
Design Resilient, Stunning, and Eco-Friendly Outdoor Spaces with TRUEGRID
Whether you’re looking to create beautiful gardens, grass driveways that won’t die or develop ruts, or industrial-grade gravel parking lots that don’t kick up dust, TRUEGRID has exactly what you need.
TRUEGRID has been manufacturing its full line of alternative paving products from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE right here in the U.S. since 2013.
Since its inception, TRUEGRID has prevented millions of pounds of plastics from entering our landfills and waterways while returning millions of gallons of stormwater to vital groundwater supplies.
Learn more about the full line of TRUEGRID products, or get an estimate today and discover how you can be true to your project and true to the environment with TRUEGRID.
Various driveway options are available for today’s discerning property owners, including stamped asphalt driveways.
How much do stamped asphalt driveways cost? What kind of maintenance requirements do they have? How does climate affect them, and how durable are they?
In order to make an informed decision for your home or property, it is essential to have all of the facts.
What is a Stamped Asphalt Driveway?
Stamped asphalt driveways are decorative driveways created using heat, a stamping template, and a plate compactor.
Stamping templates are available in various styles and patterns and can mimic brick, cobblestones, pavers, and more.
What to Know Before Installing a Stamped Asphalt Driveway
Before you commit to a stamped asphalt driveway, you should evaluate the cost, maintenance, lifespan, and durability in order to make an informed decision.
Stamped Asphalt Driveway Cost Considerations
Stamped asphalt driveways are an affordable option when compared to poured concrete, brick, concrete pavers, and cobblestones.
A new asphalt driveway typically takes less than forty-eight hours to install and is ready for use almost immediately. Poured concrete can require substantially more labor and time and a significantly longer curing period. Brick, paver, and cobblestone driveways don’t need any drying or curing periods but can be extremely tedious to install, and can substantially increase labor costs.
The material cost of asphalt is very favorable when compared to its alternatives. Asphalt typically costs less per square foot than concrete, brick, concrete pavers, and cobblestones.
Although a brand-new stamped asphalt driveway is typically less expensive than similar alternatives, stamping your existing asphalt driveway is where the cost savings really come into play.
Stamping an existing asphalt driveway eliminates the need for new materials and substantially reduces the costly price of labor.
Maintenance Requirements
One of the most significant benefits of a stamped asphalt driveway is its minimal maintenance requirements.
Although asphalt driveways will typically last around twenty years before needing significant maintenance, if you live in a place where frost heaving is common or the asphalt is subject to extreme heat, it may require attention more frequently.
Stamped asphalt driveways that experience significant frost heaving can crack and separate, and may often require seal coating, crack filling, or resurfacing.
How Climate and Weather Affect Stamped Asphalt Driveways
Asphalt is a flexible pavement that can move with weather-related changes.
If you live in a place that experiences substantial cold and frost heaving, your stamped asphalt driveway can still be susceptible to cracks. If left unaddressed, these weather-related failures will persist and often compound.
Durability and Lifespan
Because of its rugged, flexible nature, asphalt is an incredibly durable driveway material, often lasting up to twenty years with regular maintenance.
In temperate climates, you must resurface most stamped asphalt driveways after twenty years.Seal coating may be required periodically.
Attractive Alternatives to Stamped Asphalt Driveways
While a stamped asphalt driveway may seem appealing, there are other alternatives to consider before you commit to a choice.
Concrete
Concrete is a tried-and-true, time-tested material that has been used for centuries. Concrete has battle-tested advantages, but this age-old building material also has some serious flaws.
If you live in a place that experiences frost heaving or other substantial sub-grade movement, your concrete driveway will likely crack.
Once cracked, concrete is challenging to repair and almost impossible to repair in an aesthetically pleasing way. Completely removing and replacing the damaged slabs is often the only proper solution.
Permeable Pavers
Permeable pavers are plastic, interlocking grids that are snapped into place and filled with gravel or grass.
Due to their durable, engineered structure, plastic grid permeable pavers protect the delicate root systems of grass from being crushed when driven on, and they will hold gravel firmly in place.
Unlike concrete and asphalt, which can crack and split with cold weather and movement, a gravel or grass driveway built with permeable pavers are immune from weather-related damage.
Permeable pavers require virtually no maintenance, and you can easily install them as a motivated DIYer.
Unlike impermeable surfaces like asphalt and concrete, driveways made with permeable pavers allow 100% of stormwater and runoff to return to vital groundwater supplies.
Install Durable, Beautiful, and Eco-Friendly Driveways with TRUEGRID
Are you sick and tired of paying for expensive maintenance and tedious repairs on garish concrete and asphalt driveways? Never worry about your driveway again with TRUEGRID.
TRUEGRID permeable pavers are not only engineered with best-in-class compressive strength to handle vehicles of all sizes, but are also made from 100% post-consumer recycled HDPE plastics.
Choose from TRUEGRID’s range of products to find the best paver for you and your home.
- PRO-LITE is the toughest and most economical residential grade permeable paver on the market today and is perfect for driveways, overflow parking lots, bike paths, and patios.
- PRO-PLUS is the industry’s leading commercial-grade permeable paver. Engineered with industry best strength, the PRO-PLUS easily handles parking lots, truck yards, and roadways.
- ROOT is the world’s quickest and strongest grass reinforcement. Simply lay ROOT on the grass, wet the area thoroughly, and press your ROOT pavers into the grass with a roller; no anchors required.
Visit the TRUEGRID website today for a free estimate, and see how TRUEGRID can be true to your project and true to the environment.