Now that my wedding is over, I’m able to start focusing on my home ‘To Do’ list. Finally. Instead of registering for household goods and crystal, my husband and I asked for monetary donations to our driveway fund. My driveway is less than perfect. In fact it is horrendous. Now that we have some money, we decided to start getting quotes from both concrete and asphalt paving service providers.
Angie’s List has been extremely useful during this time. We’ve already had four estimates for concrete and one for an asphalt driveway. All of the people who came out were very nice, but not nice enough to cut us a break and give us a quote we could afford. So, unfortunately, it seems as though the concrete driveway might not happen since we barely broke even after all the wedding bills were paid.
I’m not allowing myself to get too discouraged just yet; we still have some more companies coming out next week to give us quotes on asphalt. It’s just a tricky subject because you have to maintain asphalt driveways, while concrete is pretty much maintenance free. Our neighbor also told us that your property taxes go down if you get an asphalt driveway, but your home value goes up if you get concrete. So what is the better investment? If anyone reads this and has an opinion on the topic, please share. In the meantime I’ll be scratching my head and emptying out my pocket book and counting the change.
Jackie, I did a little research into this matter, but it apparently wasn’t enough, as I couldn’t figure out exactly why asphalt might save you some money in property taxes. Other people on the ‘net said the same thing, but didn’t give a reason why. Someone mentioned it’s not as permanent as concrete.
If I were you, I’d simply pave your drive with yellow bricks.
I will have a concrete driveway dug up and re-done in a couple months. It goes from the street all the way into the backyard. What an eyesore. Concrete may be permanent, but that can be a curse, since concrete cracks and stains. Mine was poorly done and is a mess. It is my heart’s desire to never have concrete again. I want to fill in the backyard with *yard* and have a shorter driveway of stone or brick pavers. That way, if I decided I hate them (not likely), I could rip them out myself! With concrete, also you must consider tree roots. I’ve had a couple trees taken down. One more to go, yet I hesitate even though it’s just a loblolly pine… Another consideration is the look of concrete vice asphalt vice pavers. They pave parking lots with concrete.