I had a giant hole in my yard all summer long (since May or June I’d guess). You probably knew a little bit about it because I liked to complain about said hole, but today you will finally get the whole hole story.
I’m as excited as you are.
Of course I don’t have a proper before picture, because who has the foresight to take driveway pictures? In the above shot, if you don’t focus on Remy but instead look in the background to the right, you can see a bit of the before. Basically we have a turnaround in our driveway, which is important since it is fairly long and skinny.
When we first moved into the house, there was a garden right beside the turnaround, it was large and round and surrounded by lattice which really wasn’t a great look, so we removed it in the fall shortly after moving in.
Max had some kind of machine (I want to say bulldozer because that is what it looks like in my head but I know that is not right) basically push all of the dirt into the bush. And I hated it.
The tires from the machinery ate up the ground and made the soil that was there from the garden even worse and so soft. There was a big heap of dirt that did not make it fully into the bush that had to be removed via wheelbarrow, and people kept driving over this “mud” so we had to put a random old shelf there as a barrier to try to stop it.
To try to explain better I made this fancy diagram below:
This picture is from after the hole had been dug, but I tried to put some grass back and show where the old garden was fairly well with my computer skillz.
Hopefully you get the gist.
So something had to be done, either rehabbing the muddy area and attempting to grow grass, or Max’s plan – to widen the turnaround.
Guess what we did.
It makes a lot of sense to widen this area, as people often park here and this way two vehicles can fit side by side. But Max wanted to make sure it was done correctly, and that meant digging a huge hole.
Knowing the mess the machinery made the first time around, I wasn’t about to let Max ruin my yard again. I agreed to whatever driveway expansion he wanted, so long as he dug it by hand. So we staked it out and he dug.
He started digging by the treeline and apparently the roots gave him a really hard time and made it very difficult. Eventually he moved out away from the trees and things went a bit faster, but digging by hand still took forever.
Hence the hole in my yard for three months.
It was just under a foot deep along the entire turnaround.
Finally, Max had some “B gravel” delivered, which looks an awful lot like sand to me, but whatever.
He used a rake to spread it throughout the hole
And then he drove over it with the truck a lot to pack it down.
Apparently digging down like this and putting this “B gravel” in makes sure it won’t shift or sink? I don’t know I just went with it – the hole was being filled. This part was pretty easy.
Next he had some “Blue crushed” rock delivered, which is what the rest of our driveway is made of.
Yes, I took a picture of the pile from my window while driving in one day #lazy.
And then he worked on spreading this stuff out, using a shovel and rake. He also moved some to any holes or low spots in our driveway, and smoothed out the entry at the road.
This stuff was a little heavier and harder to work with. He took a few days to smooth this pile.
But it certainly looks a lot better!
Now there is no more mud and we have room for two vehicles to park next to each other.
You can see the colour doesn’t match very well, but Max assured me it will blend soon, we’ll see about that. Apparently the rain and whatnot changes the colour.
He packed down this stuff with the truck too.
In other news, the random garden to the right in the above picture is also finally gone! This was very exciting as I was starting to think this wouldn’t get done until next summer. If you remember, I decided I couldn’t move the amount of dirt and needed Max’s help.
He made it look really easy and had it gone in no time. Now we just need to seed this area, but the garden is gone and the remaining raised beds are all symmetrical!
We have some work to do on our grass, but we’re doing much better than I expected, I was starting to think we would have a hole in our yard forever!
Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll post a prettier project soon, but sometimes the practical things need to get done too.
Breann Morgan 