Removing driveway stains

My first car was a banana-yellow hatchback that I bought off a friend for $800. It expressed its appreciation by leaving ponds of oil on my driveway.

The beautiful thing about driving a beater is that it teaches you to be nice to strangers, because you're probably asking for a lift. Or a boost. Or a tow.

My relationship with that car ended when I had to singlehandedly push it up a rise after it broke down on a Friday afternoon in rush hour traffic on a six-lane expressway. I horsed it into an abandoned lot and trudged to the subway. My Dad and I went to work on it the next day and it was gone. I pretended not to notice, and got my Dad to drive me to a Honda dealership where I bought my first new car, which never leaked anything, ever. If there's one time I've appreciated fluid retention, it was in my new car.

I never cleaned up my old beater's oily leavings on my rental driveway years ago, which is probably why my current driveway is a karmic patchwork of oil spots. Sure, I could spend $150 on a power-washer and a bunch of commercial cleaner/degreasers. But I have a relative who used to work as an art conservator at the Smithsonian Institute, and he has personally removed every possible stain from every conceivable material. I call him the Stain Master, although not to his face since he's a bit paranoid. If you know someone like him you can beat any stain. And you can keep them humble with six easy words: 'Ew, what's that on your pants?'

Here's the Smithsonian Institute's method for removing deep-seated, stubborn stains from solid surfaces.

1. The trick with porous solid materials (like brick, stone, concrete or asphalt) is to find a solvent that dissolves the stain. Greasy driveway stains require a detergent, and the art conservator's favourite standby has always been Wisk laundry concentrate, which is a readily available and reasonably pure detergent.
2. The solvent (detergent) mixed with water puts the stain into solution. WARNING: You don't want to put your driveway into solution, just the stain. Using Varsol or other petrochemical solvents on asphalt will actually dissolve the driveway. Try explaining that to your elderly aunt when her high heels sink into the blacktop and leave her stranded like a seersucker jib in a rip tide of soggy asphalt.
3. Scrub the stain with detergent and water. This will create foam the colour of a Tim Horton's ice cappuccino. Rinse the foam off, add a little fresh detergent and scrub again. Repeat until the foam is very light in colour. It took me three applications. Each time you rinse the foam away you'll notice that the stain is still there, locked in the driveway surface. That's the stuff we're after next.
4. After the final application of detergent and water, leave the foam in place and put a couple of wet towels on top of the foam. The towels form a poultice. Depending on what you're working on, your solvent and poultice may be made up of different materials (i.e. lemon juice works well as a solvent on some stains, with baking soda as a poultice; hydrogen peroxide is also a good solvent for stains on grout or stone, with whiting as a poultice).
5. Leave the poultice to dry completely. Since the stain is in solution, it will travel to the point of evaporation, which in this case is the surface of the poultice. The stain will move up out of the solid surface, and turn up on top of the poultice.
6. You may have to repeat the poultice process a few times to get the stain out completely, especially if the spot has been there since, say, you got your first car.

This technique will not only give you a museum quality driveway, it'll also save you $150 on that power washer.