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You know, the two most common driveway materials here in Tri state area are black top and even concrete, you see them all the time. But to me, they are kind of plain vanilla. If you want a driveway that is dropped dead gorgeous, durable and built the way road ways were done 70-years ago, you want a driveway like mine, a tar and chip driveway. The way you install a tar and chip driveway is really simple, you just need to bring liquid asphalt cement to the job site, it is pretty hot, it is about 300 degrees so you have to be careful, you can get burned by it and they spray it on to your driveway and it is about 3H to a quarter inch thick and into that hot tar, they dump gravel chips. It can be brown gravel that is beautiful. You can also get gray gravel and if you come up with any different color that you can think of, they will put it into the tar. The tar really does not care what goes into it. It is very important that they put just enough tar down. If you put too much, the tar can actually ooze to the surface and cause a problem on hot summer days. But I have never seen it happen with the different companies that I used to install my tar and chip surfaces. You probably want to know what the tar and chip surface looks like up close and personal, that is a good point. I have a light loose coating of this brown stones on my drive, but look here, this is exactly what it looks like if I brush them away. This brown stones are firmly locked into the tar and it basically looks not much different than a standard black top road way or drive way, and it provides excellent traction in the winter time. And if you do want to plow and tar and chip driveway, not a problem, just tell your snow paw operator to hold that blade up about one inch and he will not push any of the stones off your driveway. If you want a tar and chip driveway, go ahead and open up your yellow pages, start calling around the different black top contractors. If you are really lucky, you just might find one that still knows how to do tar and chip surface.

I am Tim Carter, ask the builder.

If you want to discover more home improvement tips, go to askthebuilder.com

You know, the two most common driveway materials here in Tri state area are black top and even concrete, you see them all the time. But to me, they are kind of plain vanilla. If you want a driveway that is dropped dead gorgeous, durable and built the way road... click to read more