LESLIE: Spiro in Delaware, you’ve got The Money Pit. How can we help you today?
SPIRO: Hi. I’m calling about my asphalt driveway. It’s about four or five years old and over the winter, it developed some cracks that are about a foot, two feet long and about 1/8-inch in diameter. And I’d like to know if there’s something that I could do to fix it myself.
TOM: Yeah. I mean there are some good latex products that are available now for crack fillers and you can buy them at any home center or hardware store. And the key here though is to clean out any debris that’s inside the crack. Because if it’s got a lot of dirt and gunk in it, then what happens is you can’t get enough of the crack filler in there to really grab on.
Generally, it’s a texture that’s somewhat about the same consistency of, let’s say, I don’t know, spackle. And you get it into the crack, you trowel it in and usually it’s sort of self-leveling; so it sort of takes a little bit of a while and then sort of settles out. And then after that dries, you put a sealer across the whole surface and it does a good job of protecting. You’re probably always going to see the crack. It doesn’t make it disappear. Because you’ll always see sort of the indentation where it was. But it’s a really simple project. You want to do it on a cool day – not on a really, really hot day but a cool day – early in the morning. And there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do that project yourself, Spiro.
SPIRO: OK. Well, thanks a lot. You answered my question.
TOM: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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