Not Our First Roadeo

The main road to our house is rock/dirt with two gravel driveways forking off of it. The lower driveway was still in decent shape from when Sam repaired it a few years ago. The upper driveway and main road were pretty torn up after a few years of truck traffic and little maintenance.

Sam decided it was time to spruce things up. The main dirt road needed the most work. It had deep ruts where the tires drive. In order for it to drain properly, it had to be re-shaped and crowned. Thankfully, our neighbor, Kris, offered his assistance.

He re-surfaced the whole length of the mile-long road with his road grader. He made the road wider in the process and created better drainage along the sides.

Next we brought in rock. We used “pit run” as the base material. Pit run is an inexpensive product created at our local rock pit. It consists of large and irregular rocks and has a fair amount of dirt mixed in. It’s more affordable than the rock that has been crushed, sorted, and washed.

More than 30 loads of pit run were deposited along the road.

Since the rocks were the size of grapefruits, Kris brought his grid roller over.

The name explains it all. The rolling drum has a grid pattern, which crushes the rock. It gets towed with a dozer and turns the big rocks into a smaller more uniform material.

The grid roller helped compact the rock too.

Kevin used his water truck to water the mile long road. The team continued to work on it for a few days- watering, using the grid roller, and making a few more passes with the grader. This resulted in a firm 6-12″ deep layer of base rock over the road. (Some of the low spots needed a lot!)

Once we were satisfied with the shape and level of compaction, we had 1 1/4″ gravel delivered. We got many many truck loads of gravel. The the guys repeated the process of spreading it out, grading, watering, and compacting.

To compact the smaller gravel, we used a smooth drum roller. Since this was a huge project, we brought out the big guns. Instead of renting the 4 ft drum roller we usually get, we borrowed this beast!

The road has never looked so good! I think the UPS driver really appreciated the upgrade.

The upper driveway didn’t need too much work. After filling some low spots, we had a few loads of 1 1/4″ gravel delivered. It added about 2-3″ along the length of the road. It too got the full compaction treatment. It’s solid now. Hopefully it holds up to all the freight deliveries.

The lower driveway also needed some minor improvements.

Kris used the grader to make a deeper ditch along a section that wasn’t draining properly. That was the only section on that road that needed more gravel.

This leads to the big landing area around our garage. If you recall from this post (“A Draining Experience”), we had added 341 tons of base rock to the landing to get us started.

It seemed like a good time to finish this, so we kept the rock truck driver employed for another two days. He delivered more 1 1/4″ gravel with his superdump.

I could feel the power of the compactor from our living room! There was one spot in particular that caused some light fixtures to rattle every time Sam drove by.

I was glad to see the compactor heading back down the hill. The end results was quite nice and there are no longer any rocks that might cause an ankle injury. I’d still refrain from from wearing stilettos.