We have a very cool, very large barn on our property. And there’s an asphalt driveway that connects it to the road. But there was one small problem. We couldn’t open the doors.
See, the asphalt driveway leads to the center sliding doors, which is fine, but on either side, there is a set of smaller doors that open outward. Annoyingly, the turf was graded all wrong and we couldn’t open the doors.
It’s project time!
I mentioned in my Dirt post that we had 47,000 pounds (one ton) of gravel delivered to our driveway.
Yes, I know one ton is actually 2,000 pounds, but that math is meaningless when you have literally one ton of gravel on your driveway that needs to go somewhere else on your driveway and you only have one shovel.
Anyway, we used some of the gravel to line the bottom of the raised beds and to fill the bottom of the holes we made (by hand with a post-hole digger) for the garden fence. After that horror was complete, we turned to fixing the driveway.
Step 1: Dig a hole
I’m getting pretty good at digging holes. So good, in fact, that I kind of look forward to starting a new one. For this reason I was excited about this project for about 5 seconds.
Here’s the thing: grass is evil. Its roots get all in there and tangle together and it takes a crowbar to rip it out.
That’s not a joke. Here’s what it looks like:
That’s 69 inches of forged steel that weighs more than a 40″ television. The weight is useful when you slam the bar into the ground because it gets low and helps you rip out roots and rocks and stuff. It’s not so useful when you’re pulling the bar back out of the ground, which you will be doing about 6,000 times during this project.
But wait, there’s more!
After you break up the dirt with the giant crow bar, you get to dig it out. I immediately discovered that the giant crowbar didn’t really get the job done, so I had to break the dirt up even more with a spade.
And what did we do with all this precious, nutrient-dense dirt once we got it out of the ground? We threw it in the flowerbed, of course.
Step 2: Weedblock, or “Nature Weighs In”
At last we had a big hole in the ground. John build a little frame around it with some scrap landscape ties and then got down on all fours to tack down the weed block. That’s when it started to rain.
(We were actually under a tornado warning, but don’t tell my Dad.)
We decided to seek shelter until the rain eased up, then we were back at it, flexing our baby muscles in the less menacing but still very wet rain. John laid the weed block while I began the neverending process of shoveling gravel into the cart.
Step 3: Gravel
So much shoveling.
We have one real shovel, plus the spade, and somehow, working side by side, John and I managed to load it all up and drag it over to the hole we made, which was more like a small pond with all the rain.
Project Complete!
And here we are, with a cool little driveway extension that not only makes a cool crunching sound when you walk on it, but lets us open the barn doors and gives us more room to park the truck.
And the best part is, there’s no more gravel on the driveway. Win!