Big Changes Part 1
The new driveway is getting started today. We can’t afford to black top the whole driveway this year, but we are putting limestone down over the whole driveway. The first step, though, is to excavate all the old gravel that was in the driveway. I took some pictures yesterday so you can see some before and after. As with all construction, we’ve hit a few snags along the way. Hopefully everything will get finished up by tomorrow. (Thank goodness for the beautiful weather right now!)
Before:
After excavation:
Before:
After partial excavation. Part of this dirt pile was sold off thanks to Craig’s list. The rest of the dirt is being scraped out into our back yard. Then we’ll plant grass on it.
Stay tuned for part 2 of the Miller’s new driveway!
How exciting! I hope all goes well. It looks like you have quite a large back yard. How much land do you have? (Someday I want a big yard.)
I think it’s about 2/3 acre. Dan, am I right? Most of our yard is hidden behind our garage, so it’s hard to see from the house.
Thanks for reading!
I am so excited for you. We are enjoying the nice weather too. Is limestone, uh, rocks? Will it be all gravel? I am ignorant since I have never had a driveway all my own.I would appreciate some enlightenment!
It is going to look very different!! I wish we had so much land!!
Yep, crushed limestone is in fact rocks. Specifically, crushed limestone rocks.
But from what we’ve been told by our contractor, after some time, the crushed limestone will pack down and get hard, similar to a paved driveway. We’ve even been told we’ll be able to play basketball on it. We shall see. Eventually we still want to blacktop it. But even so, the first step before blacktopping is to lay crushed limestone. So it’s a step we have to do anyway. I’m just excited that we’ll finally be able to use the garage the mud will be gone. (Of course, we have new mud in the far back yard thanks to the excavation.)
Yes, it’s about 2/3 acre. We did hit a few snags as Carolyn mentioned. First off, the electric wire that we paid several hundred dollars to run out to the garage a few weeks ago was not dug deep enough and was ripped out. So the electric folks are supposed to be coming out today to fix it. But the good news is that we found the old driveway and it has a pretty good base, so we should be able to not order as much limestone as we thought, which will save us some money. Exciting!
The other thing you can’t really tell from the pictures is that the ground used to slope from left to right (as you look out the back door towards the garage). The reason for that is that they used much of the dirt from digging out the basement to slope away from the house on the left (again as you’re looking out the back).
So that’s what they were doing most of yesterday – flattening that out a bit. It will still slope slightly (to aid in drainage – the natural low spot is back in the right corner by our garage).
It really is amazing how much dirt there is in the world.
thank you!
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