It is a genuinely doable weekend, and the weekend is narrower in Akron than almost anywhere else in Ohio. Here is the material, the time, the window you have to hit, and the three places people stop and phone somebody.
Coverage on the pail assumes a smooth sound surface. A driveway that has been through a decade of Akron winters is not that. Oxidised, porous asphalt takes noticeably more than the label suggests, and the usual DIY mistake is buying to the label and then stretching what is left across the last third.
Measure the area first. Pace the length and the width, treating a normal stride as about three feet, and split the drive into rectangles if it changes width at the apron. Then buy for a porous surface rather than a smooth one, because running out two thirds of the way down a sloped drive is not a problem you can fix on Sunday afternoon.
Not the sealing. The sealing is the quick part and it is the part people picture when they decide to do it themselves.
The hours go into preparation. Killing and pulling what is growing in the edges, scrubbing oil spots so the coat will bond to them, blowing and sweeping the surface properly, and taping off the garage apron and the concrete. Then the crack work, which on an Akron driveway is the largest single job on the list and the one most often skipped.
Budget most of a day for preparation on a drive that has not been touched in years, and the crack filling on top of that. The coat itself is an hour or two.
Sealer has to hold above 50F through the whole cure, overnight included, not just while you are applying it. Akron's last spring frost averages the first days of May and the first autumn frost arrives mid to late October, so the honest season is early May through mid October and the ends of it are not safe.
Then two more constraints most DIY guides written for milder places never mention. Rain inside the cure means doing it again, and a weekend is a long forecast to trust. From the middle of September, dew does the same job as rain. A clear cool night close enough to the lake leaves the drive visibly wet at seven in the morning with nothing in the forecast, so your Saturday start is mid morning whether you planned it or not, and the usable day in October is short.
If you have one weekend available and it is in October, that is the argument for waiting until May rather than the argument for hurrying.
A lot of Summit County drives run up or down a fall, and this is the single biggest difference between doing it here and doing it somewhere flat.
Sealer runs. Worked downhill it outruns the squeegee, pools at the apron, and dries thick and glossy in a band across the bottom while the top is thin. It has to be worked uphill, into the wet edge, in narrower passes than feel efficient, which is slower and more tiring than the flat-driveway instructions assume.
If your drive has real fall on it, this is the honest point at which doing it yourself stops being obviously cheaper than having it done.
Cracks filled first and given time. Sealer is not a filler. An unfilled crack reappears through the new coat within weeks.
Edges cut in by hand. The machine-straight line against grass and concrete is most of what makes a driveway look professionally done.
One proper coat, not two thin ones. Two thin coats are not a thick one, and building film is what flakes in a freeze-thaw winter.
Nobody drives on it early. Turning the wheels of a parked car on a coat that has not cured is the quickest way to ruin a day's work.
Commercial grade material rather than retail, a squeegee crew who have done it on grades before, the crack work done properly, and somebody who carries the risk if the weather turns inside the cure.
Doing it yourself is a real option and this page is not trying to talk you out of it. The two places it usually stops being worth it are a driveway with significant fall, and a driveway with enough crack work that the filling is a bigger job than the sealing. Both are common here.
Buy for a porous surface and you will have material left, and it does not keep well through an Akron winter. Sealer is water based, and a pail that freezes in an unheated garage separates and is no longer usable next spring, however it looks when it thaws.
Do not pour it down a drain or onto the ground. Summit County runs household hazardous waste collection for exactly this, and a part pail is what it is for. If there is genuinely only a little, letting it dry out solid in the open pail and putting it in the household waste is the usual advice, but check your hauler rather than assume.
Leftover material is what fuels the door knocking trade. The crew offering to do your drive cheap because they have some left on the truck is describing this exact situation.
