Tannum Sands has been one of the busier suburbs for us over the past year. The combination of new builds, retiree downsizes, and families moving down from Gladstone proper for the beachside lifestyle has meant a steady run of driveway and patio jobs out at that end of the Boyne Tannum corridor. We finished a job there a few weeks back — a new-build home that needed a full driveway, a small entry path and a rear patio all poured in the one project — and it was a good case study in how a coastal job comes together when the sub-base is sand and the wet season is breathing down your neck. Here’s how it played out.
The Tannum Sands brief
The clients had built a new four-bedroom home on a tidy 700m² block a few streets back from the Boyne River. The builder had handed over a completed house, a roughly graded yard, and a long stretch of nothing where the driveway needed to go. They wanted a generous driveway from the kerb back to the carport (about 18 metres), an entry path connecting the front door to the driveway, and a 5m × 4m rear patio extending the back of the alfresco. They’d specified exposed aggregate for everything — both for the look and because they’d already learned from friends in Tannum that plain trowelled concrete becomes slippery the moment it gets wet, which is most of the year here. The brief was tight: a single project, single mobilisation, all done in one week if the weather played fair.
The coastal sub-base reality
Tannum Sands sits on classic coastal sandy soil — drains beautifully, holds nothing, and offers very limited bearing capacity if you lay concrete straight on top of it. Three test holes confirmed what we expected: loose sandy fill in the top 600mm with firmer subsoil underneath. Any concrete laid directly onto that loose sand will move within seasons. The right approach — and the one that costs a bit more upfront but pays back in decades of trouble-free service — is to strip the loose sand, bring in compacted road base as a proper engineered sub-base, and seal the bed with a vapour barrier before any reinforcement goes down. We did the same on a recent Cooloola Cove job — different region, same coastal principles apply.
Drainage on a coastal block
Drainage matters everywhere, but on a flat coastal block it’s the difference between a driveway that lasts and one that becomes a swimming pool. We designed a 1:80 crown across the driveway width and a 1:100 fall along the length toward the street kerb, where stormwater already had a path to the local drain. The rear patio fell toward a planted garden bed with a small soakaway pit hidden in the corner. The entry path fell sideways into the landscaped strip alongside it. Ponding water on any concrete surface around a coastal home turns into algae, slip hazards, and eventually movement at the slab edges — the half-day spent on drainage planning at the design stage is the cheapest insurance we can give a client.
Reinforcement and jointing
The driveway came in at 125mm thick with SL82 mesh, with additional N12 bar reinforcement at the kerb tie-in where the slab takes the most stress from vehicles turning in off the road. The patio at 100mm with SL72 mesh, which is sufficient for foot traffic and outdoor furniture. The entry path at 100mm with SL72. Saw-cut control joints planned at 3m intervals across the driveway width and at 3m × 3m on the patio, with proper expansion joints at every interface between new concrete and existing structure — the kerb, the house slab, the carport. Cutting corners on joints is the single biggest reason driveways fail visibly in this part of Queensland, and it’s the cheapest detail to do correctly.
Pour day and the weather window
We had a 36-hour weather window between two forecast wet-season storm fronts. Two trucks staggered through the morning, the line pump on standby, four crew on the slab, and we started at 6am to give ourselves margin. The driveway and patio went down in sequence — driveway first to use the fresher concrete on the more critical surface, then the path, then the patio. Screeded, levelled with bull floats, bagged with the aggregate exposure retarder, and washed off with the high-pressure water blast late afternoon to reveal the aggregate. The first rain hit just after dark and we had the curing blankets down across everything before it really set in. By morning the slabs were exactly as they should be.
The aggregate decision
The clients had been agonising over aggregate blend for weeks. We brought four physical samples to the site visit and laid them on the slab area at different times of day. A darker blend looked striking but would absorb heat in a Central Queensland summer — bare feet on a 60°C surface aren’t comfortable. They ended up choosing a mid-tone cream-and-grey blend with medium-sized pebbles, which gives reliable wet grip, stays cooler underfoot, and looks right against the warm cream brick of the house. The same blend ran through the driveway, path and patio so the whole project reads as one coherent surface rather than three separate jobs.
Sealing and the cure
Saw-cut joints went in the next morning before random cracking could start. Three days after the pour the slabs were walkable; seven days they could take normal vehicle traffic. Two weeks after the pour, once the slabs had cured properly, we came back and applied a penetrating sealer with a non-slip additive on the rear patio and on the entry path — both areas where the family will be walking barefoot in summer. The driveway got a standard penetrating sealer without the slip additive. Sealing protects the concrete from sunscreen, chlorine (if the patio sees pool guests), and the general weathering that coastal homes deal with.
The handover
The clients drove the family car onto the new driveway for the first time later that week and the immediate reaction — same as on every job we hand over — was about how much better the front of the house looked. The patio out back has already hosted a christening and a barbecue. Three months on, after several decent wet-season storms, the drainage is performing exactly as planned. No ponding anywhere, no edge erosion, no movement at any of the joints.
What this means for other Tannum Sands, Boyne Island and Calliope homes
If you’re in Tannum Sands, Boyne Island, Calliope, or anywhere across the Gladstone region with a new-build home or a tired old driveway that needs replacing, the conversation worth having is sooner rather than later. Wet-season pours are doable but stressful for everyone; dry-season pours are dramatically easier to plan. The decisions that make the difference are nearly always the boring ones: sub-base prep, drainage design, reinforcement schedule, jointing pattern. None of those are visible in the finished concrete, but they’re the entire reason a driveway lasts thirty years rather than five. We’re happy to come and walk through a site before any concrete is booked — and on coastal blocks especially, that walk-through usually saves clients real money down the line.
Pool surrounds, sheds and decorative work
While most of our work is driveways and patios, we also handle a steady stream of pool surrounds, shed slabs and decorative concrete work across the Gladstone area. For homeowners thinking about a pool surround project, the principles around slip resistance and heat are the same ones we covered in our piece on concrete pool surrounds in Gladstone. For shed slab work on rural and lifestyle blocks, our piece on concrete shed slabs in Gladstone covers the engineering and council side. And for decorative finishes inside the home — polished, stamped, stencilled — see our piece on concrete finishes for Gladstone homes.