At Jacksonville Pavers we often hear this questions, is it okay to just pave over our concrete driveway? The problem with paving over your driveway concrete has to do with the initial preparation of the site.

With concrete, if you're worried about strength and stability, the solution is to simply lay a thicker slab. Because of this, contractors laying concrete rarely worry about preparing the base. The ground underneath a concrete driveway may be prone to shifting or sinking, and there's really no way of knowing what's down there until it's dug up.

Laying bricks over concrete creates two worries:

The unprepared sub base

The concrete itself

If something is wrong with either of these layers, it will show through the bricks. Unfortunately, when brick driveways are done over concrete, they can be resting on an unstable base, the resulting bricks can be prone to instability. Expansion joints in the concrete will quickly turn into cracks, which will require costly ongoing repair jobs. In extreme cases, shifts in the ground could crack the entire surface, just as a house's foundation may crack if improperly laid.

So putting brick paving over concrete may look good at first, but there are bound to be problems over time. It just doesn't make fiscal sense to do it, as that driveway will need a lot more work in the near future. So it is best to remove the concrete first and than lay the bricks.