Premium Concrete Driveway & VDOT CG-9B Apron Install | ACO Trench Drain | Burke, VA

This Burke, Fairfax County home got a complete concrete driveway replacement, a permitted and bonded VDOT CG-9B apron at the street, and an ACO trench drain at the garage and foundation transition.

The driveway and the apron

Our standard 4-inch driveway gets about 8 inches of excavation and about 4 inches of compacted #21A crushed stone, with 6x6 welded wire mesh pulled up into the center of the slab during the pour and a slip-resistant broom finish, poured in 4,000 PSI air-entrained concrete. The apron is a different slab built to a different standard: on curb-and-gutter streets VDOT uses its entrance-gutter standards (CG-9B or CG-9D), the apron sits in VDOT right-of-way, and it needs a VDOT land use permit with a refundable surety. We reinforce an apron only where the jurisdiction's detail calls for it. In our experience these reviews commonly take one to two months, and the disturbed ground around the new apron has to be restored and stabilized with established grass before VDOT signs off and releases the surety.

The trench drain

When a driveway slopes down toward the garage, the slab becomes a funnel, and the rubber seal at the bottom of a garage door is not built to hold back standing water. We set the channel a few feet out from the garage door, placed to suit site conditions, so the surface between the drain and the garage slopes away from the garage. We install polymer-concrete channels (ACO is one example) rather than plastic kits, set the channel in a concrete bed per the manufacturer's installation detail, pour concrete along the sides of the drain to lock it in place, and trench a rigid, smooth-wall PVC discharge line set to a continuous fall to carry the captured flow away from the house.