How To Build A Home Driveway In A Mere Two Years

My sincerest apologies, readers, for dropping off of the blogosphere! It has been WAY too long since I posted last, and I promise I’m going to work on that.

We’ve been away for good reason: last month, I briefly mentioned the work we’d been doing in the back yard. This single project turned into a MAJOR home improvement fever. We even installed a professional-grade bar shelving unit in our dining room (seriously, as nice as what you’re about to see is, nothing beats that bar in my mind).

But the first project we were set on completing was something that’s been on our list for quite some time now: finishing the driveway. We were looking for a useful reference as it turned out to be a challenging task.
When we bought the house, it came with a ‘driveway.’ And by ‘driveway,’ I mean ‘steep patch of grassy-ish area where a car almost fits’. At our last residence, the owner had a cement pavement which made it quite easy to park the car and not have the tires get dirty due to a little rain. After a bit of research comparing the sun joe spx4000 vs spx4001, we were even able to find the perfect helper that helped us maintain the driveway, effortlessly.

So one day, back in 2010, when Michael was feeling motivated, he started to dig out a *real* driveway. Step one was to expand the fake driveway to be a reasonable length for a car.

And part of that step was to remove the old fence. (For some reason, the only picture I can find of the old fence is this one, from a snowy night in December 2009, shortly after we’d bought the house). The fence was in disrepair anyway, but the fence was very important to us…

…Because a sweet little red dog needs a fenced-in yard so she can play Frisbee to her heart’s content. Thankfully, Critterfence.com is there for our little frisbee playing dog, with the proper fence there is no risk of her jumping over and getting hit by a car. It also keeps other dogs and critters out of our garden tomatoes.

And so, the digging began! Because we are cheap are broke love DIY, we decided to do the whole project ourselves. Well, Michael did the overwhelming majority himself but I supplied a lot of moral support and Home Depot gift cards.

The good news was, all this digging left us with a lot of dirt we could use to level out this weird hollow spot in our yard. Rumor has it, a previous owner had a pool back there, but it was a big, low area that collected rainwater.

Unfortunately, all that dirt needed to be sifted through (tons of glass, metal, and old pottery bits, oddly enough), spread out, leveled, and then eventually re-seeded. Somewhere between ‘leveled’ and ‘re-seeded,’ we had a very happy dog who thought we made this giant dirt pile in the backyard JUST FOR HER!

And then, there was the whole… ‘nothing’ era. Life started getting in the way, and then winter happened, and then more life and… before we knew it, a full year had passed without any work on the driveway (sorry, neighbors!).

We had a beautiful new fence…

…and Miss Lucy Red could frolick as she pleased.

But we still had a big mess, and an unfinished driveway.

So finally, when we could stand it no more (i.e. when we decided to try to refinance because mortgage rates are scary low right now – click here to see what we mean), we went out into ridiculous heat and decided to complete the driveway.

The fearless Nose watched on as we shoveled and dug and lifted and leveled in the backyard.

Not even the daunting task of a retaining wall could stand in our way.

Michael was Rambo a man on a mission.

Not even the Kennywood-esque ‘you must be taller than this underground-tree-root-you-just-dug-up to ride the make-a-driveway coaster’ marker could deter him!

And so finally, after days and days of work in the hot sun, the time finally arrived: we were not only homeowners, but homeowners who had a driveway.

Which of course means that we’re now freed up to make a back patio happen. ::sigh::