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Pavement, tarmac, macadam: whatever you call the stuff, it’s a surface often taken for granted.

Countless kilometres of black ribbon line the roads from Kamloops to Kapuskasing, to say nothing of the effort put into maintaining perfect surfaces at professional tracks like Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.

Even the ubiquitous suburban driveway is slathered with enough blacktop to rival the runways at Pearson International Airport — without the delayed departures, of course.

In what can only be described as a strictly first-world problem, I recently had it with my gravel driveway and the constant headache of refilling potholes, dealing with drainage and the wear on our snowblower after striking rocks lurking in winter snowbanks.

It is not disingenuous to suggest we should have bought stocks in Ariens Replacement Parts as a money-making opportunity, such were past expenditures on snowblower repair.

Spending scads of money all at once is not my forte, which explains why no fewer than three driveway paving quotes — from three different years — sat mouldering in my email inbox.

The small issue of a global pandemic sent prices through the roof on just about all consumer goods, and oil-based products like pavement have been particularly affected. In this case, the going rate to apply tarmac in front of my home rose by 30 per cent in four years.

It was time to get off my duff. After deciding on a company, it didn’t take long for Wil-Kare Paving to appear at my door. Measurements were taken, brows were furrowed, and questions were asked about paving right to the step of the front door or simply steamrolling the driving surface.

With grand designs involving curved walkways in mind, we settled on the latter. Besides, whip straight driveway edges are easier to trim with the whipper snipper, right? All the while, my addled brain was trying to comprehend why it was costing the price of a used car to lay down a bit of pavement. The answer came on Day One of the job.

Here’s a list of what appeared in front of my home ready to work at 6:30 a.m.: a Mack TR212 Granite tandem dump truck full of driveway stone, a Freightliner dump truck full of brown gravel for base work, a highway-sized grader, plus one mini excavator and a yellow Bomag steamroller towed on a flatdeck by a Freightliner Business Class M2 four-door commercial rig.

There were more hand tools than at a carpentry convention aboard an F-350 SuperCrew pickup, one that featured a handy side-drop bed and power-assisted lifting crane. In the bed were stone compactors and a gasoline-powered Husqvarna pavement cutter the size of Texas. Seven hardy men were on hand to operate it all.

And that was just for Day One, the window of time during which the Wil-Kare crew expertly scraped and flattened my existing driveway before laying down a base several inches thick in preparation for the actual paving.

That diesel-powered steamroller, it must be said, shook the entire house. This crew was compacting and steamrolling the base layer by 8:30 a.m. and laying a topcoat of driveway stone an hour later. The result? A surface flatter than the Prairies and ready to accept a fresh tier of hot asphalt in two days’ time.

Heeding the warning over those couple days not to scuff up the smooth base layer, the second crew showed up around noon on Friday to begin Day Two. It had rained earlier in the morning, but not torrentially so they could still use the surface for paving. Had there been rivers of misery falling from the sky, the base would have needed to be re-flattened.

This was a clue that this company had no intention of doing sloppy work since they were adamant a smooth base was necessary. If you take any buying advice from this story, let it be that the company paving your driveway needs to take the prep work as seriously as the final step.

Onwards to paving. The new crew of seven showed up for this task armed with an enormous pavement laying machine which was, despite its size, licensed for the street. According to its operator, this LeeBoy 8520 can adjust its width depending on project demands, all controlled from a perch high atop the rear of the machine.

It is sort of like the Zamboni at your local rink, except this thing spits out pavement instead of sweeping ice. It has 106 horsepower to move the better part of 20,000 pounds and generally does so at about 1.5 kilometres per hour or less during paving. Feeding the beast was a Volvo tandem dump truck full of raw material.

By 2 p.m., all hands were doing finishing work, with one person on a hand-held compactor, someone else on yet another Bomag steamroller, and more rakes and shovels than found in an entire garden section of any large hardware store. One person’s sole task was to run the company’s Bobcat street sweeper, ensuring the only fresh pavement left behind by Wil-Kare after the job’s completion was in my driveway.

Let me emphasize: this simple suburban driveway required the use of 14 people, a dozen pieces of diesel- or gasoline-powered machinery, multiple flatdeck trailers and enough hand tools to last into the next millennia. Two different working days and a scribbler full of mathematics rounded out some of the intangibles.

Suddenly, the four-figure price tag seemed like something of a bargain.

In total, the crews added several inches to the top of my original gravel driveway, expertly feathering the edges so it blended with my garage entrance and gently sloped to the street for water drainage. Remember those two details when getting a contractor to do this work at your home.

Weeks later, and I remain impressed by the results. And perhaps the total cost of the project won’t be as high as first thought; after all, I’m going to save a fortune on snowblower repairs.

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