New asphalt driveways, overlays, rebuilt aprons and full tear-out and replace, across metro Atlanta. A coat of sealer protects asphalt that is still whole. Once a drive has sunk, rutted or broken up over soft clay, it needs new pavement, and the question becomes how much of it and what goes under it.
The top of a drive tells you less than people expect. Two driveways can look equally tired from the street and need completely different work, because the difference is in the ground.
Most of metro Atlanta sits on the Piedmont's red clay. Dry, it sets hard. Wet, it turns soft and stays wet for a long time, because clay holds water instead of letting it drain away. A driveway is only as strong as the ground under it, so on clay the ground work is most of the job.
A proper replacement digs out the old asphalt and any stone left under it, finds the soft spots in the clay and takes them out, then builds back a compacted layer of crushed stone thick enough to spread the weight of a car across ground that will be wet every time it storms. The asphalt goes on top of that. Skimp on the stone and the finished drive will look perfect on the day and show every tyre track by the second summer.
Water is the other half. Plenty of drives here run downhill to a garage under the house, and plenty more carry the whole yard's runoff straight across them. A new drive should be shaped so water leaves it, toward a grate, a swale or the street, not toward the garage door or into a low corner. If the fix is a trench drain or a changed slope, that goes on the quote as its own line.
Georgia's dig law treats removing a driveway and cutting into the ground under it as excavation, and anyone excavating has to file a locate request with Georgia 811 first. The law sets the lead time at no less than two and no more than eight business days, and the utilities mark their lines before work starts. Milling or repairing pavement that stays within the depth of the existing pavement, up to twelve inches, is outside the definition, so a straight overlay usually does not need one. A tear-out almost always does. The request is filed as part of the job, and the start date allows for it.
The last few feet of your driveway, where it crosses the sidewalk and meets the street, normally sit on public right-of-way rather than on your lot. Metro Atlanta is split into a long list of cities, each with its own rules for work in that strip, and a drive that meets a state route falls under the Georgia Department of Transportation instead of the city. Rebuilding the apron, widening it or changing the curb cut usually needs a permit from whoever owns the road. The county pages list what each city publishes: Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett.
Your quote says who is pulling the permit and whether its fee is in the price. A contractor who offers to redo an apron without mentioning the city at all is leaving you to find out later, when an inspector asks.
Paving is priced per job, after someone has looked at the drive and at what is under it. There is no honest per square foot figure for it, because the ground work varies too much from one property to the next.
What you get back is one written price and a scope that says what comes out, what goes back and how thick, and what is being done at the curb.
Hot asphalt has to be rolled while it is still hot, so it needs dry ground and air that is not too cold. Here that rules out fewer days than it does up north. Most of the year is workable, and what stops a job is a cold snap in the winter months, a run of wet days that leaves the clay soft, or an afternoon storm in summer. Summer paving starts early for the same reason sealing does.
New asphalt should not be sealed right away. The oils in the fresh mix need six to twelve months to work out and the surface needs time to harden, so the plan for a new drive is paving now and a first coat of sealer after it has been through a Georgia summer. In real heat a brand new drive also stays soft enough to scuff for a while, so keep turning wheels and trailer stands off it for the first weeks.
On a commercial lot or a community's private street, the same choice gets made section by section. The rutted delivery lane may need rebuilding, the parking rows an overlay, and the rest only patching and a seal, all done in one mobilisation so the lot goes back into use once. See parking lot sealcoating and striping and, for associations and managed properties, HOAs and property managers.
Send the address through the form and say it is about paving. The drive gets measured and looked at, and you will be told plainly if a patch and a seal would do instead. If it does need new asphalt, you get a written scope and one price. The paving is done by a local independent paving contractor.
