Orange County is the middle of the service area: Orlando, Winter Park, Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden and the unincorporated suburbs between them. This page covers where we work in the county, what its ground and its growth do to asphalt, and what each city asks for when a job reaches the street.
Orlando, Winter Park, Maitland, Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden, Windermere, Oakland, Belle Isle, Edgewood and Eatonville, plus unincorporated areas such as Pine Hills, Dr. Phillips, Hunters Creek and the east side toward the Econlockhatchee. If you are in the county and do not see your community here, send the address anyway.
Orange County is lake country. Lake Apopka on the north west edge, shared with Lake County, is the fourth largest lake in Florida, and there are chains of smaller ones through Winter Park, Conway and the Butler Chain around Windermere. The Wekiva, the Econlockhatchee and the St. Johns all run through or along the county.
Under the sand is limestone, and water moving through limestone makes sinkholes. The best known one opened in Winter Park on 8 May 1981 and grew to about 320 feet across and 90 feet deep, taking a house, the city pool, several cars from a repair shop and part of Denning Drive with it. That is extreme, but smaller settlement over soft ground is common, and it shows up in a driveway as a dip that deepens year after year. A dip like that is a question for the ground, not for sealer, and the quote will say so.
Near the lakes the water table is close to the surface, so drainage is the thing a paving or repair quote has to get right here. Water that cannot get off a drive sits in the sand underneath it.
For most of its history Orange County was citrus country. Freezes in December 1983, January 1985 and December 1989 finished off most of the commercial groves, and by then the county was already growing around Walt Disney World, which opened in October 1971. The decades since have filled much of the south and west of the county with subdivisions.
That leaves three kinds of driveway. Older, narrower drives in Winter Park, College Park and the older Orlando neighborhoods, often under heavy oak canopy, where roots and shade are the problem and the edges are hemmed in by walls and walks. Later subdivisions across Pine Hills, Apopka and Ocoee where a whole street was paved at once and now ages at once. And newer communities in the west and south where the driveway may be under a year old, which means it should not be sealed yet.
The apron and sidewalk sit in the public right-of-way, and the rules for touching them change at each city line. From the cities' and county's own published material:
Sealing and crack filling that stay on your side of the sidewalk are not apron work. Anything that changes the apron is done under the right permit, and the current fee goes on your quote because fees change.
The asphalt can be cut out and relaid, but a root that is still growing will lift it again. The quote sets out the options, and any limits the city puts on cutting roots of protected trees are checked first.
Sealer keeps water out of the surface; it does not stop water coming up from below or sitting in a low spot. If the drive holds water, that is a drainage repair and it is quoted as one.
That is apron work in the right-of-way, so it goes through the city's engineering permit and has to match the width of the drive. It is quoted as a paving job.
Neighbouring counties: Seminole to the north, Osceola to the south and Lake to the west.
