Repainting the Same Year as a New Driveway

The order, on one page

A new driveway and a repaint are two crews with opposite habits. The concrete crew works with heavy trucks, wet material, saws and washout water. The painters work with ladders, drop cloths and a surface that has to stay clean until it is dry. Put the driveway first and each crew works in its own mess. Reverse the order and whoever arrives second damages the first crew’s finished work.

Why the concrete goes first

Three things come with a pour, and none of them is friendly to new paint. Ready-mix trucks and the equipment around them swing close to walls, corners and the garage door. Washout water and slurry splash up the lower siding. And the yard itself turns to mud and then dust for a week or two, which settles into whatever is still wet.

Painters can work around that, but they should not have to. If the repaint is already booked for the same month, the sensible fix is to move the paint, not the pour: concrete has a placement window that depends on weather, and a repaint of the house walls can wait for a dry week afterward.

What to wait for

There are three waits, and only one of them is about the concrete itself.

• The cure. The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association’s guidance on curing in place says new concrete should be kept at adequate moisture and temperature for a sufficient period, typically 3 to 7 days, so it can develop the strength and durability it was designed for. That is a job for the concrete crew, and it is a reason to keep other trades off the slab until they say otherwise.
• The traffic schedule. The driveway page of one Lake Norman contractor gives the commonly quoted intervals as about two days before walking on a new pour, about seven days before driving a car on it and 28 days before heavy vehicles, and it attributes those figures to national publishers rather than to its own testing. Treat them as typical, and ask for the schedule on your own pour.
• The yard. Wait until the mud has dried and the dust has stopped. Washing a house while the yard is still soft just moves the mess around.

The 28-day figure is worth understanding, because it is not a deadline for painting. The American Cement Association says standard practice is to measure compressive strength at 28 days, which is a consistent point for testing rather than the day the slab is finished gaining strength. Painters do not need to wait 28 days. They need the concrete crew’s word that the surface can carry their gear.

Protecting the new slab

The driveway is the first thing everything falls on: paint drips, chips from scraping, mildew-treatment runoff, caulk and the occasional dropped tool. Bare concrete takes liquids in, so the aim is to keep them off it in the first place.

1. Cover a strip along the house. A canvas or paper drop cloth along the foundation line, taped or weighted down, catches most of it. The NRMCA notes that curing paper is less likely than plastic sheeting to mar or mottle a surface, so we use paper or canvas rather than plastic on fresh concrete.
2. Keep ladder feet and equipment off it. A ladder foot is a point load. Use the lawn, pavers or a board to spread the weight, and ask the concrete crew before any lift goes on the slab.
3. Rinse, do not scrub. After the wash and scrape stage, a gentle rinse of the strip beside the house removes treatment residue. Hard scrubbing of a young surface is the wrong way to clean it.
4. Leave sealing to the end. A sealer or stain goes on once nobody is overhead. It is the one coating on the property that a falling drip would permanently mark.

Where the driveway meets the house

One piece of the driveway concerns the paint directly: which way the slab slopes at the wall. If water runs toward the foundation, it splashes the lower siding every time it rains, and peeling low on a wall is the classic sign. The model International Residential Code asks that the grade fall at least 6 inches in the first 10 feet away from the house, and that hard surfaces within 10 feet of the foundation slope at least 2 percent away from it.

North Carolina adopts its own residential code built on the model code, so the local inspector’s edition is the one that counts. Still, the rule of thumb is useful when the forms go in: if a flat or reverse slope is going to sit against the house, raise it then, because it cannot be changed afterward without cutting the slab.

If the house is older

A house built before 1978 may have lead in its old paint. The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting program requires certified firms and lead-safe practices for paid work that disturbs paint in those homes. That means plastic containment and careful cleanup around the walls, and it is another reason to put the new slab last in line for contact with scraped paint: finish the concrete, cover it, and let the lead-safe setup go over it.

Planning the concrete side

The concrete schedule usually sets the year. For the concrete itself, the concrete driveway contractors serving Huntersville, Cornelius and the rest of Lake Norman include Carolina Custom Concrete, whose driveway page describes broom, exposed aggregate, color and stain, and stamped finishes. Whoever you choose, ask for the pour date and the cure and traffic schedule in writing, so the painting can be booked behind it.

What the repaint involves

When the slab is ready, the repaint is a moisture project with a color step at the end. On our exterior painting jobs the siding and trim are washed and scraped first, rotten wood is replaced rather than painted over, and bare wood is primed before the first coat. Book it for after the cure, tell the crew where the new concrete is, and the cover goes down before the first ladder does.