Something Concrete

Being at home all the time really makes you recognize all the annoying things about the place you live. For me, it's been the driveway.

The driveway has been sinking since we moved in. Pulling in from the sidewalk started to make the car go PLUNK! about a year ago. Mack band-aided it for the past year with a paver we put in the 4" drop by the sidewalk. Alas, the paver is now chunks of moveable rock and the car is PLUNK!ing again. This time the car is not a Chevy Volt. It is a Tesla. It is Mack's fancy Tesla. 

And now we're getting a new driveway.

Picking a driveway is seriously harder than it looks. A couple years ago I consulted with a landscaper for a yard design, and she sucked so bad she suggested bringing the driveway into the yard. I hate large swaths of concrete, and I had no idea why she was suggesting we move the driveway into the view of the front porch. Well, I still think her idea is stupid, but I have a new sympathy for figuring out a driveway concept that looks good. It's frigging hard.

I thought about keeping it simple and just redoing the whole driveway, but see the part above where I hate large swaths of concrete. Then I was going to get that concrete grate looking stuff that the grass grows up in, but it looks way more modern than my 100-year-old house. Then I started looking at ribbon driveways, a driveway concept I'd seen but had no idea had a name. They seemed like an option, so I called my Do It Guy, Kyle, and he got to work.

Of course, because it's a home improvement project, we found a problem. The dirt under the driveway by the house was wet. Did we have a sewer leak? Did we have a sprinkler problem? What the heck? Kyle climbed under the house and dug a hole that could've been a grave for 10 people trying to find an answer. The answer was just wet dirt. We had to delay a bit to let it dry out, and then, business time. 

While Kyle and his crew broke their backs, I had to figure out what to do with the middle of my ribbon. I went down a driveway rabbit hole on Pinterest and decided I'd fill it with rock. Then I decided I'd fill some of those gaps in the rock with plants. I'd make a driveway garden!

Maybe one day my love of gardens will turn my thumb green.

Grateful that we'd bought a pick up truck, I headed to the stone store, where I was confronted with La Paz cobble and Yosemite cobble and Sierra cobble, large cobble and small cobble and pebble cobble. Jesus, why is there so much cobble to choose from! I ended up buying 3 tons of Yosemite cobble. Yep, the same stuff I loaded up on during our trip to the Sierras earlier this year for free cost me hundreds of dollars. As they loaded the pallet into the truck bed, I wondered if that old girl would break in half. Luckily she didn't. That'd be what I'd do unloading all this damn rock and placing it in the middle of the damn ribbon. 

Since we have nothing else to do, I popped up the sunshade so I wouldn't burn to death and started taking armloads of rock to the driveway. I had to buy dirt to put under it so it wouldn't just be a place to break your ankle, and so my garden could have a chance, so I also hauled about 500 pounds of that over. I put on my podcasts, zoned out, and 8 hours and a broken body later, behold.... a driveway masterpiece. 

I'll be shocked if the plants survive, but isn't it just the cutest driveway you've ever seen for now? If it's not, shut up because I'll never walk the same and it needs to be worth it.