Days 14 – 16: Driveway complete! (mostly)

I’m excited to announce that I finally have a driveway!

Two local guys tag-teamed carving out the driveway with two great big backhoes.

…but not before having to destroy the work I’d done so far with the soil-cement – which kinda hurt to watch! But they were saying that the culvert needed to be dug back into the embankment more and further down. So I trusted their expertise and consented, under the condition that they could do it without damaging the culvert, which was very securely in-place after all my hard work.

Of course, that meant next to nothing to such a large machine, and here’s how that went:

As you can see, they did damage it a little bit, but I ended up just flipping it around so that it would be covered by a coupler.

After moving the first section of culvert out of the way, work began on the drive:

Sadly, this had to entail taking out several trees, which was kinda hard to watch:

In fact, I even took out a couple myself along the path that I thought I was clearing for the backhoe operators, but they ended up having to take a slightly different path since they needed sufficient dirt from the high side to fill in the low side. So they had to cut into the hillside more than I thought, which meant that once again, the work I had done was mostly wasted.

But oh well, I’d rather sacrifice the effort now in exchange for enjoying a better driveway in the future.

So off they went, and within a matter of 4-5 hours, the driveway was complete…

…except for the culverts, which took a little more time to dig, place, and cover:

You already saw the finished product in the thumbnail for this post, but here’s a little better view:

It looks to me like the slope of the drive is still protruding just as much into the road as it was before – if not more – so we’ll see how that goes after the next time the road gets scraped by the county.

They were going to come back today to put more dirt on the side of the culvert that’s visible in the picture above since you’re supposed to have a foot of material above it, but they didn’t want to burry the end of it in the process.

What isn’t very visible is the other end of the culvert, which could use another 10-foot section to better facilitate an angled approach from the other direction. But on the whole, I’m happy with the finished product, and the digging portion ended up costing me $2k instead of the $3k that was quoted by a couple other people.

It was very exciting driving up it for the first time, although I can tell I have some tree limbs to trim to give myself some maneuvering room at the top.

More importantly though, what this means is that I can finally put my RV on the property and start actually living there!

This also means that I can put a large container of water up there, as well as installing all 7 of my solar panels, as opposed to the 2 that are feeding my batteries from the roof of my RV at the moment. (Which btw, isn’t enough to run my air conditioner on battery power, so I need to run my propane generator for that.)

The dirt-work contractors were going to come back and 1) level the build site and septic drainage area, 2) dig the 8′ x 17′ x 5′ hole for the septic, and 3) dig the 12′ x 80′ x 4′ bed for the drainage lines.

This was going to cost another $2k, which seemed like a good deal since Brandon had quoted $10k to install the whole system which would’ve included roughly $6k in materials, which would mean $4k in labor.

That seemed too rich for my blood, and even though the $2k that the other guys quoted wouldn’t include installing the whole thing – just digging the massive area for pit and drain field – it still seemed like a good deal.

Well, after they dug the driveway one of the guys said that while technically they could do all the remaining work in one more day, and technically, they do charge $2k/day for 2 guys on 2 machines, they felt like they’d be leaving too much money on the table. So they could do everything for the $2k except digging the bed.

And as Brandon pointed out – even though the driveway was a good deal – that’s pretty salty for just leveling the build site and digging a big hole, and it probably wouldn’t require 2 people either if they weren’t digging the bed (which has to be ‘dead-nuts’ level on the bottom, so one person generally walks around with a laser level receiver to help guide the person who’s digging with a machine).

I’m not sure I ever got a solid answer as to how much more they actually wanted for the extra digging – which in fairness ended up being a larger area than I originally discussed with them, which I’ll get to in a minute – but I got the vague impression that they might’ve done all the remaining work for $4k more.

In fact, they didn’t even want to do the smaller version of the bed that was originally discussed, so it was it was a bit of a reversal on their part, though they were at least being up-front about it.

I should clarify that I recently qualified for a project loan through Home Depot which is enabling me to build a 3-bedroom, 3-bathroom version of the house; woo hoo!

It will mean forgoing a garage for the time being – at least if I want to maintain a healthy buffer, with the expectation that other things will likely be more expensive than planned – but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make for now.

Anyway, for now, I’ll leave you with this beautiful sunset, seen from the build site:

Until next time…