For the past week, I've been pushing hard to get my driveway exposed. I know I've mentioned this before, but the previous owners of my house were total eco-freaks; most of the guy's ideas were good, but apparently he was obsessive-compulsive about composting etc. I've got 12" or more of good soil EVERYWHERE... including the still-decomposing wood chips on the driveway. As a condition of the sale, the PO cleaned off the driveway so I could move in... but that just left piles of stuff on either side, and the driveway going back to the garage was unusable as parking there would mean stepping in a two foot deep pile of composted wood chips.
I've had four different people stop by and take the topsoil... two of them twice... One guy filled up an 8' pickup bed, and I could give him another full load if he wanted; I still have a huge pile beside the garage and a couple more piles in the back yard that could stand to be knocked down. At one point I started hitting gravelly soil, so I built a frame of 2x4s to stretch 1/2" hardware cloth across... I was screening the soil as I went into my wheelbarrow and giving the stuff away almost as fast as I could dig it up. The stuff that didn't make it through the screen got piled up in the middle of the driveway. This AM I finally uncovered the last of the driveway proper, so I had to start sorting the screened out stuff - I handpicked out the biggest rocks for use as landscaping rocks and the gravelly stuff I washed on my screen and then threw in a wash tub to float off the organic crap. So far I have a huge pile of landscaping rocks (about 5x what I forsee a need for in the near future, and to think that I told one guy that I didn't want to give any of *those* away because I had plans for them!) about 15 gallons of semi-clean gravel (what the heck am I going to do with that?) a decent sized pile of gravelly muck still to sort (yes, I will sort it
- but not in the rain. That's just cruel and unusual punishment.)
As of right now, I can park my car about eight feet farther forward than when I started this whole exercise :(
I think I will see if there is any beer left in the fridge...
In Studebaker-related news, my new driveshaft should be here Monday. Cool! I tried the guy JP found, $270 for a 3" steel shaft, delivered,
*with* a new 4-speed slip yoke. Can't beat that with a stick.nate