Cracks filled, potholes and broken edges cut out and rebuilt, and soft spots over wet clay dug out properly, across metro Atlanta. Most drives that look finished are not. They have a handful of places where water is getting in, and fixing those well is what keeps the rest of the asphalt from following them.
If failures like these cover a large part of the drive, repairing them one at a time costs more than an overlay or a new drive, and you will be told so. That is asphalt driveway paving.
Cold patch is the black material sold in bags at every hardware store. You shovel it into the hole and tamp it down, and it fills the hole for a while. It is a reasonable way to stop a car dropping into a pothole this week. It is not a repair, because it never bonds to the sides of the hole, and in a Georgia summer it softens and gets pushed out by the next set of tyres.
A lasting repair saws the failed area back to firm asphalt with square edges and lifts out everything that has broken. Then the ground gets looked at. Where the clay under the hole is wet and soft, it comes out too and crushed stone goes back in its place, compacted. Hot asphalt fills the hole in layers, each one rolled, and the seam around the edge is sealed so the next storm cannot find its way in along it.
Small patches like that are done before the sealer goes down and are inside the sealing price. Bigger areas, or repairs on a drive that is not being sealed, are priced as their own job.
Atlanta does not get the freeze that breaks up northern driveways. What it gets instead is rain, around fifty inches a year, much of it arriving fast in summer thunderstorms. Every storm pushes water down any open crack, and under the crack is clay that soaks it up and holds it. Wet clay loses its strength. The asphalt over it starts to flex every time a car rolls across, the flexing opens more cracks, and more water gets in. One crack becomes a web, and the web becomes a hole.
That process runs faster in the heat, because warm asphalt gives more readily under load. Closing the cracks and rebuilding the first soft spot is the cheapest work a driveway will ever need, and it saves the section around it.
On a lot, damage follows the weight: the entrance, the drive lane, the dumpster pad, and the spot where the delivery truck waits every morning. Those get repaired first, and then the whole surface is sealed and the lines go back so the patches and the rest of the lot age together. For an association or a property manager, the repairs sit on the same written sheet as the sealing so there is one plan to approve. See parking lot sealcoating and striping and HOAs and property managers.
If the drive is being sealed, crack filling and small patches come inside the one price per square foot for the job, not on top of it. A repair on its own, or an area big enough to be cut out and rebuilt, is priced per job once somebody has seen it, because the cost turns on the size of the area, how deep the soft ground goes and how much stone it takes to put back. Either way you get one written number before any work starts.
For a while, yes. Fresh asphalt is darker and tighter than a drive that has had years of Georgia sun on it. Sealing the whole drive once the patch has settled is what makes it read as one surface again.
Often, yes. Hot asphalt needs dry ground and air that is not too cold, and plenty of winter days here give it both. A wet week that leaves the clay soaked is a bigger obstacle than the cold.
The raised section is cut out and rebuilt level. What happens to the root is a separate decision, and on a large tree it may involve the city or an arborist before anyone cuts it. We will tell you which, and we do not cut roots without your say.
Yes. The apron takes the turning load and the runoff from the gutter, so it often fails first. Where it sits on city right-of-way, the permit comes as part of the quote.
A patch that is cut out and rebuilt on firm stone is built like new driveway, so it should last as long as the asphalt around it, as long as its edges are kept sealed.
Send the address through the form, and a photo of the damage if you can take one. You will hear what it is, whether a patch and a seal are enough or whether it has gone past that, and what it costs. Repairs are carried out by local independent contractors.
