Designing Your Home: Make Your Driveway Count

If you are building a new home or renovating your home, it is easy to forget or overlook your driveway. The fact is that the average drive will take up around 800 square feet of your front yard. Many of us see our driveway as a functional area of concrete or asphalt but with a little imagination, and not too much cost you can add curb appeal and make a real statement about you and your home with your driveway.

By maximizing your driveway space you can increase your property value and make sure that you make the most of every precious inch of your property, helping you to get maximum impact for your buck. Finding the best suppliers with the right equipment and skills to give you the look that you want and that will last the distance is crucial to making sure that your driveway looks great for years to come.

GET CREATIVE

If you want to make the most of the front of your house, sit down with your family and think about what you will use your outdoor space for. You may have a basketball fanatic in the family, want a safe environment for the kids to play on their bikes or want to be able to cook outside without taking up too much garden space. List down all the things you want to be able to do outside of your house.

Once you have your list of functions, go crazy! Think of what would look good; let your imaginations run wild. You could paint a mini roundabout on your driveway, giving your kids a fun and safe environment to cycle or scoot around. How about a pizza oven or barbeque tucked away, which will give you a flat, safe area to cook outside?  If you love color you may want to investigate stained concrete; concrete that is pre-colored and treated when dried to give a great finish.

GET REAL

With a pretty big list of activities and ideas about how your driveway could look, it’s time to get realistic. Look at costs and prioritize the items on your lists into three categories of necessity:

• Totally (essential usage of the driveway, like being able to get to your garage!),
• Partially (features that you would really like but are not essential), and
• Not (the really crazy ideas will probably go in this category!).

Once you have your priorities, take a look at what you can afford. You may love brick driveways, but if you can’t afford them stamped and colored asphalt can look just like brick but at half the cost.

GET LOOKING

With your wish list complete and a good idea of the intended functionality and look of your driveway you are well on your way to creating an outdoor space that will lift the first impressions of your home whilst helping you to optimize the space that you have.

Finding local suppliers and traders that you can rely on will be your next challenge, but with the help of online directories, research and advice from friends and neighbors you should be able to find fairly priced, high quality materials and craftsmen to give you a creative, functional driveway that will help to put a smile on your face every time you come home.

About The Author
Trust a Trader is a UK based online directory created to help individuals and businesses find local traders that they can rely on. Trust a Trader’s accreditation system works alongside a customer review process that gives people looking for great value traders an insight into the levels of quality and service that they can expect.