Thank you. Yes I do like the sound of a charcoal colour but am hoping it won't dominate the look of the house and make it look to dark. Cheers

Have a look at the permeable paving products. The stones look good too, can be a bit difficult to keep them in place though as they can spread around.

Try diggers paint brush restorer. Small patch first, you don't want it to spread it. Failing that there is a company called So Safe. It produces graffiti remover and will get rid of that in minutes. My guys use a lot of it with very good results.

We've got a gatic style pit lid on our exposed aggregate driveway. You can fill these pit lids with a material like exposed aggregate/concrete and sand etc. to make the pits blend a bit better with the driveway. A couple of driveway people have said that using exposed agg there just doesn't work well due to the inability to get exposed agg even and looking good on the pit lid. Other people have said it looks bad if you don't fill it with exposed agg because that would be different to the driveway. Just wondering if anyone has done this in the past and what they went with? We would've thought exposed agg for the continuity of things but now we aren't sure. Thanks in advance!