when i landed at the Atlanta airport on August 2, 2022 i took an Uber to a Toyota dealership where i got a new Tacoma. then i drove to our new house, saw it for the first time and was glad.
later i started washing the car, but noticed it was always dirty by the time i pulled into the garage. our quarter-mile long rocky, dusty, puddle-inclined driveway was the culprit.
here's what it looked like.
not the worst thing ever on dry days, but made me look like an off-roading redneck missing 3 teeth on wet days. it had to go.
a guy named Jason came to consult me on various options, from concrete to asphalt to "crush and run" and everything in between. it appears the best bang for the buck ($660 /load), as well as low maintenance long-term, is asphalt "millings." these are formerly deployed chunks of asphalt, grinded up and discarded by another project and then resold.
over time the chunks synthesize back together, giving both the appearance and stability of regularly poured asphalt. each truck load holds around 30 tons of it, and a truckload gives you about 150 feet of road, approximately 10 feet wide.
plotting our first pour
with a quarter mile of drive to pave, this took a while. the process is simple, they just lift the back and the millings dump out. but as you can imagine, that's only half the job. you also need to finesse the product to fit the contours of your space.
for us that meant making a huge pad at the top, between our house and barn. we did this mostly with metal hand rakes, but later used the tractor.
putting my back into it
flush FTW
since the asphalt itself was over 1 hour away, it took the driver 3 days of going back/forth to finish the job. here are some shots at the middle section of our driveway.
this bump is where one truckload ended, another began. we smoothed it later.
by the front road entrance, a specialty tractor guy named Maxwell came and gave us one of those flare-out treatments. apologies for the poor shot here, should have gone wide angle. a few days later Maxwell came back with a double barrel 14 ton roller ($1,050 for 1300 ft), which accelerates the setting of the millings (basically just black gravel) into a more cohesive, flat and smooth surface.
soon when the summer sun begins to hit our new driveway it will set further, but already we've fixed the "muddy redneck splashes" on my truck. so, mission accomplished.
