PAVED, NOT PEEVED

Aug 19/10

The big event this past week was getting the driveway and area between the house and shop paved.  The crew arrived on Friday morning to start preparing the area and we are glad that we had removed the top rocks that we wanted for landscaping projects.  Once they got going with the bobcat, they had everything scraped down to dirt and piled beside the shop in a couple of hours.

In the afternoon, the dump truck arrived with a gravel mix that was spread out and packed as the base for the paving.  They used the paving machine to spread the gravel and then watered and rolled it to make a solid base.

   

It was a long turnaround time for the dump truck and the crew didn’t finish packing the base until about 7:30 that evening.  The crew drove back home to the Castlegar area for the night.

The next day, they were here at 8:30 in the morning and started paving shortly after that.  They had 3 dump trucks with pups that came from Castlegar (actually, Genelle for those who know the area) where the asphalt plant is located. so there wasn’t any waiting time between loads.  They started by the house, worked over to the shop, then back along the area in front of where we park the trailer and then down the driveway.  They worked hard and fast and had the asphalt laid by noon.

The next 3 hours were spent on rolling, fine tuning areas that needed adjustment, shouldering the edges with gravel and tidying up corners, edges, etc.  They had to do some extra work near the street entrance where the paver operator did a little “wobble.”  They fixed it up so well, you wouldn’t know it happened.  Here’s a collage of the before and after photos.

It was an exciting and noisy 2 days of activity.  The neighbours were glad to see the crew pack up and leave on Saturday afternoon.

The rest of our week was much quieter with a trip to Colville, WA on Tuesday, a motorcycle ride to Greenwood yesterday and we spent 3 half days rebuilding the broken fence panels from the July wind storm.  Our neighbour didn’t want to do anything with the fence in the near future so we retrieved all the pieces from his yard and rebuilt it ourselves.  It was hard work with some of the boards split and shattered but Stuart cut some plywood support boards and it all looks good now, just need to stain a couple of boards.  We are sure happy to have our privacy back.

Starting from scratch

As good as new