I love looking back to the earlier stages of our home-building and homestead-establishing process. We were so blissfully unaware of the many headaches that awaited us, and even putting up a rotted piece of lumber with our street numbers on it was exhilarating.
We have a pretty long driveway. I think it’s over 300 feet long. And we didn’t want it to be a straight line; we like driveways that have curves. This meant we needed a lot of gravel, and someone to deliver it (and maybe even help spread it out). Well, we have a neighbor, John, who’s super nice and happens to do gravel and other such materials as part of his small business. Win! So we got to work preparing for this anticipated driveway. Hoping to subdue the grass that our driveway would be covering, I ordered a huge 40′ x 105′ silage tarp that we cut in half lengthwise and positioned on the ground (weighing it down with large stones and chopped wood) to smother what was underneath without using gross chemicals. Gross chemicals aren’t welcome here. Take a look:
We realized quickly that, even after cutting the tarp in half and having over 200 feet in length, we were quite short of reaching all the way to the county road. So we had to get a couple more tarps at the nearest big-box store to cover the rest […we were still short]. We let those tarps sit for about 3 weeks, right up to the hour that John was coming to deliver the first load of gravel. Ideally, I would have kept the tarps in place for longer, but they did a nice job smothering the grass enough for our driveway needs.
Our neighbor, John, did a fantastic job not only delivering the gravel, but bringing his skid-steer loader to spread and level it out for us. Talk about grateful… he saved us DAYS of heavy labor that would not have achieved as good of a result. We were pretty happy about it. I took a video I was so happy…
Now that we had a driveway, things could start happening. Our well installation was the first big step. We were there when the trucks arrived and started the process… it was fascinating to watch. I was also a bit on-edge, because you have no idea what type of soil/rock they’ll have to drill through and if they are going to reach a nice aquifer at 50 feet or 250 feet (if you aren’t aware, it’s quite expensive to drill a well, and it gets more expensive by the foot). We didn’t have much success that first day of drilling, which was a bummer, but they reached water the second day, and thankfully they didn’t have to drill a million feet to get there.
After the well was taken care of, it was time to start excavating for the foundation footers! This part was enjoyable for the fact that we could start picturing the layout of the house & garage at-scale.
Soon after everything was dug out, concrete footers were poured.
A lot of work was happening in a short amount of time, and we were thrilled to break ground on our dream. FOURTEEN MONTHS after moving back to this area, fourteen months of living in my parents’ basement, and we had broken ground.
Until next time,
Holly