Your paving job, day by day
A 45 square metre double driveway takes four to five working days on site: half a day to set out, a day to excavate and cart away 8 to 12 tonnes of spoil, a day to build and compact the base, a day to lay, and a day to cut, haunch, joint and clean. You cannot park on it for 24 to 48 hours after the last edge is poured. Here is the whole thing, stage by stage.
The two weeks that decide whether the job runs smoothly.
Most delays on a Geraldton paving job are not caused by the paving. They are caused by a caravan nobody could move, a reticulation main that was not marked, a pallet truck that could not get near the kerb, or an unlocated telecommunications lead-in that stopped the excavator dead. All four are solved in the fortnight before the crew arrives, and none of them cost anything.
The single most useful thing you can do is order free Before You Dig Australia plans for your address. They take up to 2 business days to come back and they show the registered services running to your property. They do not show your own private lines: the reticulation you put in, the lead to the shed, the pool pipework, the low voltage garden lighting. Those are the ones that get cut, so walk the area with a can of marking paint and a handful of pegs and mark everything you know about. Ten minutes there routinely saves a day and a plumber.
Stage by stage on a 45 square metre driveway.
Real durations for a two or three person crew in Geraldton. Bigger areas add days roughly in proportion once you are past the first day of set-up.
| Stage | How long | What actually happens | What you need to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead time after you accept | 2 to 6 weeks | Pavers ordered, delivery booked, crew scheduled. Stocked units are quick, special orders freighted from Perth add 1 to 3 weeks. | Confirm the paver, colour and pattern in writing. Order Before You Dig plans. Tell the neighbours which week it is. |
| Delivery day | 30 to 60 minutes | 4 to 6 pallets arrive, each 1.2 to 1.5 tonnes covering 8 to 12 square metres, craned or forklifted onto a firm flat spot. Road base and sand tipped separately. | Clear a hard, level drop zone near the kerb. Keep cars off the verge that morning. |
| Day 1 morning: set out | 2 to 3 hours | String lines, levels and falls set, edges pegged, services relocated or protected, cut lines marked against the crossover and the house. | Be contactable for 20 minutes. This is when the last decisions on levels and edges get made. |
| Day 1: excavate and cart | 4 to 8 hours | Old surface broken out, ground taken down 180mm to 250mm depending on the build, 8 to 12 tonnes of spoil loaded to bins or a truck. | Cars, boat, caravan and bins out by 7am. Dogs inside. Windows shut on that side. |
| Day 2: base and compaction | Half to full day | Geotextile where the subgrade is loose sand, then crushed limestone road base placed in two layers, watered and compacted with a plate or roller to 100mm or 150mm final depth. | Leave the garden tap accessible. This is the noisiest half day of the job. |
| Day 2 to 3: screed and lay | 25 to 35 m² per day | Bedding sand screeded to 20mm to 30mm, pavers laid off a string line in the chosen bond, joints held at 2mm to 3mm. | Keep kids and pets off the screeded sand. One footprint means re-screeding that section. |
| Day 3 to 4: cut, haunch, joint | 4 to 8 hours | Perimeter cuts on the wet saw, concrete edge haunch poured to the free edges, final plate compaction over a rubber mat, stabilised jointing sand swept and vibrated in. | Expect the saw for 1 to 3 hours. Washing off the line. Nothing parked on new work. |
| Day 4 to 5: seal, clean, hand over | 2 to 5 hours | Surface washed and swept, limestone sealed if specified, offcuts and pallets removed, verge and reticulation reinstated, spare pavers stacked for you. | Walk the job with the crew before you pay. Check falls, joints, edges and cuts. |
| Cure and settle | 24 to 48 hours, then 6 weeks | Edge haunch cures before vehicles. Joints settle slightly with traffic and the first rain, which is normal. | No vehicles for 24 to 48 hours. Top the joints up at about 6 weeks if they have dropped. |
Weather, access and unmarked services are the three things that move these numbers. Sealing adds a day and needs a dry, low wind window.
Tick this off before day one.
Print it or tick it on your phone. Your ticks are remembered on this device, so you can come back to it the night before.
Two weeks out
The week before
The morning the crew arrives
While the work is on
Handover day, before you pay
Stop and ask if you see these
Want a start date rather than a maybe?
We give you a written scope, a fixed price and a week, then we tell you the day before we arrive.
Access, noise, dust and everyone at home.
Access decides the price as much as the area. A mini loader is roughly 900mm wide and fits through most standard side gates. A 1.7 tonne excavator needs about 1.2 metres and a skid steer wants two metres plus. If the only way to the back is a narrow path, everything is barrowed: 9 tonnes of road base moved by hand is a full extra day of labour, and it belongs on the quote as a named line rather than as a surprise. Tell whoever quotes you about the gate, the step, the slope and the overhanging tree before they price it.
Parking and the verge. Pallets need a firm, flat drop zone, usually the verge or the kerb line. Reticulation under a verge does not enjoy a 1.5 tonne pallet sitting on it, so tell the crew where your sprinklers run. Your own cars are off the driveway from the first morning until the haunch has cured, which is four to five days in practice. Bin night is the one people forget: work out where the bins go on the Tuesday before, not on the Tuesday.
Power and water. One outdoor 10 amp power point and one working garden tap. The base needs water to compact properly, and in a Geraldton summer that is hundreds of litres over a driveway, because dry crushed limestone will not knit no matter how long you run a plate over it. The saw needs water for a different reason: dry cutting concrete or clay throws respirable crystalline silica, and the national workplace exposure standard is 0.05 milligrams per cubic metre averaged over eight hours. Any crew cutting dry on your block is a crew to send home.
Noise, dust and smell. Western Australia allows construction noise from 7am to 7pm Monday to Saturday and not on Sundays or public holidays, under the state environmental noise regulations. The genuinely loud parts are the plate compactor and the cut-off saw, which between them run two to four hours on a typical day rather than all day. Dust is the Geraldton signature: crushed limestone is fine and white, it finds flyscreens, pool filters and car paint, and it is worse on a windy afternoon. Close the windows on that side, park the good car around the corner, and run the pool filter after the crew has gone rather than during. Smell is a non-issue unless you are having limestone sealed, in which case a solvent based sealer will be noticeable for 24 to 48 hours and a water based one barely at all.
Pets, kids and working from home. Gates get propped open while barrows are running, which is how dogs go missing on paving jobs. Put the dog inside or with a friend for the machine days. Sand piles are irresistible to children and a screeded bed is ruined by one footprint. If you work from home, the pattern is predictable: loud bursts mid-morning and mid-afternoon, quiet in between. Book the calls that matter for the first hour of the day.
What actually stalls a Geraldton paving job.
Here it is wind before rain. Geraldton only gets around 440mm to 470mm of rain a year and most of it lands between May and August in short bursts, so a whole wet week is rare. What is not rare is a 30 knot southerly through the afternoon, and that matters more than people expect: screeded bedding sand blows out of a prepared bed, fine jointing sand will not stay where it is swept, and sealing in wind is a waste of the sealer. On breezy weeks we screed and lay in the morning and do cutting and haunching in the afternoon, which is the reason a crew sometimes seems to change task at lunch.
- Unmarked private services. Half a day to a full day, plus a trade. The most common single delay.
- Wet subgrade after winter rain. Base will not compact in standing water and there is no shortcut. Usually 1 to 2 days.
- Special order pavers. Freight from Perth is around 420 kilometres and a shortfall mid-job can cost a week.
- Access surprises. A gate 100mm narrower than expected turns a machine job into a barrow job.
- Late changes to levels. Changing a fall on day three means lifting what is already down.
- Crossover approval not in place. Anything on the verge stops until the City of Greater Geraldton signs off, which is why we sort it first.
A fair contract handles weather honestly: no charge for weather days, dates shift rather than penalties applying, and the crew tells you the night before. If a quote promises an exact finish date in July with no weather clause, that is optimism rather than planning.
What handover should look like, and where the waste goes.
A finished job should look boring. Surface swept and washed, joints full to the top, no sand heaps in the gutter, no offcuts in the garden bed, pallets and plastic strapping gone, verge raked, reticulation heads working, and a small stack of spare pavers left somewhere out of the way for future repairs. Ask for that stack. Matching a discontinued paver in five years is the difference between a $200 repair and a $3,000 one.
The waste stream is worth knowing about because it is a real cost line on your quote. Sound pavers we lift are stacked and offered back to you first, then to a recycler if anyone will take them. Broken concrete, old bitumen and clean fill go to the city Meru waste facility, where tipping is charged by the tonne, and a 45 square metre driveway generates 8 to 12 tonnes of it. Saw slurry is contained on site and not hosed into the gutter, because a stormwater grate in Geraldton runs to the ocean. If a quote has no line for spoil disposal, ask where the old driveway is going.
Finally, the honest bit. Not everything that looks wrong at handover is wrong. New concrete pavers commonly bloom with white efflorescence in the first 12 to 18 months and it weathers off by itself. Joints drop a few millimetres in the first six weeks as traffic settles the sand, which is why we top them up rather than treat it as a defect. Natural limestone has genuine colour and texture variation because it is stone. What is not normal is water pooling, pavers rocking underfoot, an edge with no haunch or a fall running back toward the house. Those are defects, and our warranty page sets out exactly how to raise one. If you want to know what a failure looks like a year or two later, the sinking paving warning signs page is the companion to this one.
Book a paving crew with a real start week
Send your details and we will book a free on-site measure, then give you a written scope, a fixed price and a start week you can plan the caravan around, normally within one business day.
Questions people ask the week before.
How long does it take to pave a driveway in Geraldton?
Can I park in my driveway while the paving is being done?
How loud and dusty is a paving job?
Do the pavers need power and water from my house?
What do I need to move before the crew arrives?
What happens to the old paving and the spoil?
More reading: driveway paving, DIY versus professional, how much material you need, budget tiers and the suburbs we cover.