About Rockford Driveway Paving

Rockford Driveway Paving is a locally owned asphalt contractor working driveways in and around Rockford, Illinois. We replace driveways that have failed, resurface the ones that have not, patch potholes and fill cracks, pave new driveways on raw ground, convert gravel lanes to asphalt, widen and extend existing drives, seal sound surfaces, and pave and repair parking lots for small commercial property. We are licensed and insured in Illinois.

The part that separates one paving bid from another is invisible once the job is finished. We compact the subgrade and proof-roll it to find soft ground. CA-6 crushed stone goes in as thin lifts, each lift compacted before the next one lands on it. Soft clay gets geotextile fabric underneath so the stone does not vanish into it. Then hot mix in two courses, a coarse binder course carrying the load and a finer surface course shedding the water, both rolled while the mix is still hot enough to reach density. A driveway built that way is asphalt spreading load into a base. A single thin lift over loose rock is asphalt sitting on a problem.

Northern Illinois is the reason we talk about base depth so much. Frost drives about three feet down here, and clay lies under most of this county. Clay holds water. The water freezes, swells, and lifts the driveway. Then the thaw arrives, the soil softens, and the same ground that carried a truck in January will not carry a car in April. The county posts load limits on its own roads every spring for exactly that reason. Compacted crushed stone gives that water somewhere to go instead of somewhere to freeze.

We also talk homeowners out of work. An overlay quoted over an alligatored driveway will crack again in the same web, so we quote the replacement and explain why. Sealer on a broken surface buys one good-looking season, so we say so rather than sell it. Some long rural lanes make more sense as a rebuilt and regraded gravel drive than as asphalt, and we will tell you when yours is one of them. Losing that job costs us less than putting our name on something that fails.

Everything goes on paper before anything starts. Square footage, compacted base depth, compacted asphalt depth, what leaves the property, and the price. We schedule against the plant calendar, so the date you get is a real date. Call (815) 555-0155 with a question about your driveway, whether or not there is a job in it.