We were leaving for errands this afternoon when a guy in a truck stopped at the bottom of the driveway and offered to help us fix our driveway with blading, plus tar and chip application. We said we were in a hurry, but we talked with him about options. We finally said we would allow him to blade the bottom of the driveway where we have the most problem. If we liked what he did, we would consider the tar and chip application for the lower part of the driveway because there was no way in the world we could afford to do the whole thing.
When we came home, there were three trucks on the road in front of our house. We saw that they had really improved the lower part of the driveway – in fact, they had bladed almost the whole length – 650 feet! They were ready to do the tar and chip. We told them we had not come to any agreement on anything and wanted an estimate of how much 100 feet up our driveway would cost. We finally came to an agreement on the price, saying that we would not pay anything more than this.
We are really pleased (and relieved, to be honest) that they really did a good job for us.) My husband went down to see for himself. It looks as if the whole bottom section of the driveway as been newly graveled. They laid down two coats of tar and then covered it with fine gravel, using a heavy roller to imbed the gravel into the tar. Then they put a lot more gravel on top of that. They made the driveway entrances on both sides flatter, so hopefully, the UPS man, who comes up our driveway from the ‘wrong side,’ should have a much easier time getting traction and hopefully won’t cause so much damage to our driveway. We really like him, and we like having UPS delivery, but we’ve been spending a fortune trying to fix the ruts he makes as he tries to make it up our driveway. Here are some pictures of the bottom 100 feet of our driveway –
This shows you a view from across the road from our driveway. The saw horse is there is discourage anyone from using that part of the driveway until it has a bit more time to set. This is the direction from which the UPS guy comes. There used to be a kind of hump just past the saw horse, but the guys bladed it out.
This is the opposite side of the driveway – the direction we use most often.
The improvement (blading, tar, and gravel) go up to several feet past the owls.
This is a few from up past the owls looking down toward the street. We got about 1/6th of the driveway done. This was the hardest part to keep in good shape, so we’re hoping that this will help us a bunch. Fingers crossed!
(I DID make sure that we received a written receipt of what the job entailed and what we paid when the job was finished.) We saved a lot of money by being ready to act when all the trucks, supplies, and equipment were in the area. I don’t think we could have afforded what we had done today if we had simply called the company, had them come out and give an estimate, and then come out to do the work.
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