Category Archives: Restoration

I feel like a broken record, but this was another project we did for a repeat customer. (I’m starting to understand we do keep our customers). His driveway was sealed by us a few years back, but his pavers were in bad shape. They had lost a lot of their colors due to not being sealed until years after installed. My customer bought the house roughly 5 years ago, and pavers were put down 15 years ago. They didn’t fail, the original homeowners did by never sealing them.

Back when we first started using Seal N Lock we didn’t have access to many restoration options. We simply went out, deep cleaned the surface, re-sanded, and sealed with 3 coats of Super-Wet or Natural. We simply locked sand in and gave the customer sheen or gloss. Fast forward a few years now we have many tools at our fingertips to restore pavers. We have now become very proficient in restoring the colors of pavers using special blended tinting agents. Its not that we have ever done a bad job. It’s the fact that we simply get better with each project we do. His pavers were still in good shape just needed color. So we steam cleaned the surface in order to open up the pores of the pavers again so they would absorb the tinting agents. We then mixed up a reddish tint color applied to the surface until the desired color was achieved. We the re-sanded, and sealed the colors and sand in and gave the customer the high gloss sheen they wanted. It a great feeling to know that we can transform pavers the way we do. We don’t seem to get any brand new installations any more. Most of our projects are restorations and repeat customers. We don’t mind. We love a challenge. This driveway came out great, and everyone in the neighborhood will notice it now.

Today we started a restoration project for another repeat customer. This customer had roughly 3000 sq. ft. of driveway pavers. We had sealed up his pavers a few years back and truthfully it was a re-seal over a xylene based product the first time we did it. Anyone who knows anything about Xylene products knows they are not to formidable in Florida weather. When applied improperly, they can retain moisture and turn the paver system white and milky. Anyway, 3 years ago when we were relative still new in the business (Maybe 2 years in), I spoke with the homeowner about some of these imperfect areas and he told me not to worry about them and simply just re-seal his driveway. Removing the old sealer is very costly, and he didn’t feel it was necessary. He just wanted it cleaned, sanded, and sealed for a gloss finish. I obliged. Fast forward 3 years to today and he wanted it resealed again. This time, the additional 3 years of the xylene sealer “delaminating” under our first seal really had turned the paver system white and milky looking. A dark brown paver now seemed light tan and the customer really didn’t know the difference. I guess when you stare at something long enough you lose sight of what it looked like originally. This time around I told the homeowner that we needed to do this project right. We needed to remove all the old sealer, get back to a bare surface, then start our typical paver sealing process. I wouldn’t do the sealing otherwise. Other companies may have done what we did the first time, but we like to think he trusted us and valued my opinion. He was very hesitant to do this as the cost was much higher. I felt obligated to give him a good price seeing as though we had already worked together and this probably should have been done the first time. For example, we charged him roughly 3k to seal the pavers the first time. To remove all the old sealer as part of our business costs twice as much. 6K for this particular driveway. I didn’t have it in me to charge our standard pricing as once again, we probably should have diagnosed this and been adamant on removing the old sealer the first time. We settled on a $4,500.00 price which made me feel like I was doing the customer a good deed, and even though it was higher then the first time we did it, the customer understood why it needed to be done. We still need to turn a profit, but this price made us all happy. End of the story is we removed all the old sealer, re-sanded, and re sealed the pavers and they came out beautifully. I mean beautiful. Now going forward we can continue to re-seal them with ease and perfection. We felt good about this project at the end and I think the customer did as well. We made a video of this project. Dark brown paver driveway.