Widening an existing interlock driveway is a different job from laying a new one, and the difficulty is not the paving. It is the join.
The matching problem, stated honestly
Three things work against a seamless match:
- Colour drift. Concrete pavers lighten and mellow with UV and weather. A brand-new paver from the same line, with the same name, in the same colour, will not match a ten-year-old one. It will match in about five years.
- Discontinued lines. Manufacturers retire shapes and colours regularly. If your driveway is more than a few years old, there is a real chance the exact paver is no longer made.
- Batch variation. Even current products vary between production runs.
What we do about it
- Identify the existing paver first. Before quoting, we work out the manufacturer and line from the shape, thickness and chamfer. Sometimes it is still available.
- If it's available: lay the new field, and expect a visible tone difference for a few seasons that closes on its own. This is usually the right answer, and we would rather tell you to accept a temporary difference than sell you something permanent.
- If it's discontinued: the honest options are a deliberate contrast band at the join — a soldier course or a border in a complementary paver, which reads as design rather than repair — or lifting and re-laying the existing pavers so the old and new material is mixed across the whole driveway with the odd-colour pavers concentrated where they show least.
- What we won't do is tell you a near-match will be invisible. It won't, and you will look at it every day.
A contrasting border around the whole widened driveway, in a current paver, with the new field laid inside it. The border ties old and new together deliberately, the eye reads a design decision, and nobody sees a patch. It costs a little more in cutting and it solves the problem permanently.
The base transition
A widening puts new base against old, settled base. If the new base is not built to at least the same depth and properly compacted, the new section settles and you get a ridge along the seam within a couple of winters. The transition also has to be excavated back far enough that the new base is not sitting on the sloped shoulder of the old one.
This is where cheap widening quotes go wrong, and the failure shows up on exactly the line you will be looking at.
Before any of that: the permit
If the widening changes the access in the City right of way, you need an access permit — modifying includes widening — and then a road cut permit for the work. And the zoning width caps decide how much wider you are allowed to go in the first place.
| Where your property is | Maximum driveway width |
|---|---|
| Downtown core and urban areas | Generally 6 m |
| Urban lots with less than 6 m of frontage | No individual driveway permitted — the driveway must be shared with an abutting lot |
| All other areas, including the rural and village areas | 50% of the lot width |
| Every property, as a separate cap | All accesses together — driveway and walkway — cannot exceed 50% of the frontage they sit on |
Work out your maximum → · Permit guide →
Cost
Budget the usual $18–30 per square foot installed, toward the upper half of that range: a widening is all edge and seam, both of which are labour. A 200–350 square foot widening typically runs $4,000–9,000 before permits and any curb or culvert work. Full breakdown →
Send a photo of your existing driveway
A close-up of the pavers and a shot from the street is enough for us to identify the product and tell you whether a match is possible.