People sometimes assume concreting is a pretty repetitive trade — pour the slab, screed it off, broom it, walk away. The reality, especially around Gympie, is that just about every job has its own personality. The block has its own slope and soil, the client has their own priorities, and the weather window we get is never quite the one we’d choose. We finished a job in Southside earlier this month that was a great example of how all those variables get juggled at once. The clients had us replacing a tired old concrete driveway and pouring a new pool surround as part of a bigger backyard renovation, and the way it came together was satisfying enough that I thought it was worth writing up.
The Southside brief
The clients had bought a tidy 1990s home on a generous block in Southside about three years ago. They’d recently put in a new fibreglass pool in the backyard and had also been wanting to deal with the front driveway, which was original, badly cracked, and stained from years of car drips. They wanted both jobs done together if we could schedule it that way — partly for the cost efficiency of one mobilisation, partly because they were already living in a building site and wanted the disruption over with in one go. The pool surround needed to be safe, cool underfoot, and low-maintenance. The driveway needed to look the part for the front of the house and handle two cars plus the occasional caravan. Both jobs were going to be exposed aggregate, but with different aggregate blends to suit the different roles.
The site walk and what we found
The old driveway had to come out. Two long cracks ran from the street through to the carport, and one corner had sunk visibly under the weight of years of car turning. We dug a couple of test holes and found the original sub-base was inconsistent — patches of compacted gravel mixed with sections of basically loose sandy soil. No wonder it had moved. The pool surround area was raw earth — the pool builder had left it for a follow-up trade — but the levels needed thinking about. The fibreglass pool sat slightly higher than I’d have liked relative to the back fence, which meant we had to plan drainage carefully so storm runoff didn’t end up flowing toward the house. Gympie storms are not subtle, and a pool surround that drains the wrong way is a problem you get to live with for decades.
Demolition and sub-base prep
Day one was the demolition crew with a small bobcat and a road saw. The old driveway came out in chunks and went onto a tip truck for recycling. We then dug to the right depth, removed the dodgy sandy patches in the sub-base, and brought in fresh DGB20 road base which we compacted in two layers with a vibrating plate. For the pool surround, we carefully levelled the area with a slight fall away from the pool coping toward a planned drainage point, and laid the same compacted road-base sub-base. None of this is glamorous work, but it’s the foundation that determines whether the slab cracks in three years or sits perfectly for two decades. Skipping the sub-base step is the single most common reason for failed driveways across the Gympie region.
Reinforcement, formwork and joint planning
For the driveway we used 125mm thick concrete with SL82 mesh and additional bar reinforcement at the high-stress points where the driveway meets the carport slab and the street kerb. For the pool surround, 100mm with SL72 was sufficient because there’s no vehicular load, but we added a thickened edge beam where the surround meets the pool coping for extra protection. Saw-cut control joints were planned in a 3m × 3m grid for the driveway and a 3m × 4m pattern for the pool surround, with proper expansion joints where the new concrete met the existing house slab and pool coping. For more on why expansion and control joints matter so much, our piece on concrete pool surrounds in Gympie goes into the detail.
Pour day: the bit you’ve got one shot at
Pour day is the day every concreter watches the weather radar like their life depends on it. We had a 48-hour window forecast and we used every minute of it. Two pumps booked, six crew on site, three loads of concrete on the day for both pours staggered by an hour. The driveway went down first, screeded off, levelled with bull floats, then bagged with the aggregate exposure retarder. The pool surround came right after with a different aggregate blend — lighter coloured pebbles, smaller sized for cooler-feeling underfoot — and the same retarder treatment. By mid-afternoon we were done pouring; by late afternoon we were on the high-pressure water blast that exposes the aggregate, which is the magic moment when a flat grey slab suddenly becomes the textured, decorative surface the clients have been imagining for weeks.
Aggregate choices: why we used different blends
We used different aggregate blends for the two pours, which surprises some clients. The driveway aggregate is a darker, slightly larger grey-and-charcoal blend that hides oil drips and tyre marks and looks suitably solid against the front of the house. The pool surround aggregate is a lighter cream-and-grey blend with smaller pebbles, chosen specifically because lighter colours stay cooler underfoot in a Gympie summer. CSIRO testing has shown dark aggregate slabs in full sun can hit 60°C — too hot for bare feet — while lighter blends are dramatically more comfortable. For a deeper dive into how to think about aggregate choices, see our comparison of exposed aggregate vs plain concrete driveways.
Sealing and the curing window
The day after the pour we did the saw cuts for the control joints — timing here is critical, the cuts have to be made before random cracking starts but after the slab is firm enough not to ravel under the saw. Three days after the pour, both areas were ready to walk on. About a week later, once the slab had cured properly, we came back and applied a penetrating sealer with a non-slip additive on the pool surround zone. The sealer protects against chlorine, sunscreen, and general weathering, and the non-slip additive keeps the wet barefoot grip exactly where it should be — important for a backyard with kids.
The handover
The clients were genuinely chuffed. They’d been quoted by a few different concreters before us and had been most worried about whether we’d deliver the pool surround drainage properly — which makes sense, because it’s the bit that’s invisible until it rains hard. Six weeks on, after a couple of decent storms, the pool surround is performing exactly as planned: water sheets cleanly to the planned drainage point, no ponding anywhere, no backflow toward the house. The driveway is settling in beautifully and they tell me the neighbours have been over to ask who did it.
What I’d say to other Gympie homeowners
If you’re in Southside, Monkland, or out toward Cooloola Cove, Tin Can Bay or Goomboorian, and you’ve got an old driveway or a planned pool surround in the works, the early planning matters more than people expect. Get the levels right, plan the drainage, choose aggregate blends to suit the role of the surface, and build in proper joints. None of those decisions are expensive in their own right — but getting one of them wrong is what separates a slab that lasts two decades from one that needs replacing in five years. We’re always happy to come and walk through a job before any concrete is booked. For homeowners thinking about decorative options for inside the home, our guide to stamped, stencilled and polished concrete finishes is a useful read too.