The next time someone knocks on your door and offers to pave your driveway, you may want to reconsider. When a man knocked on Patricia Robinson’s door in New Oxford, Adams County on May 22 and offered to pave her driveway, it seemed too good to be and true and it was. As a result, she is $880 in the hole. “It makes me feel awful,” Robinson said. After the job was done, the man told Patricia that her driveway would begin to harden in a couple weeks, but so far it hasn’t and it’s only getting worse. I now need to fix the driveway,” Robinson said. “It’s squishy. It’s soft. It’s loose. It’s falling apart.”
Reputable pavers like Bruce Hake of Just Seal It are no strangers to seeing this sort of thing happen to people like Robinson. “They’re coined as gypsies,” Hake said. “They come into town, they have an inferior product and what they are trying to do is trying to get in, get out, get as much money as possible and then leave.” Hake tells people to follow a checklist when meeting with searching for a paver:
1) Ask them for a business card
2) Ask for referrals
3) If they claim to do work in the neighborhood, ask which houses they’ve done.
As for Robinson and her family, they don’t want to see anyone else go through the same thing. “It’s already too late now,” Robinson said. “We’ve already been conned. I know they’re doing it to other people.”