Extending the Driveway

One of the projects Ed was hoping to get accomplished while I was here was to extend his driveway with pavers. He parks his truck on a concrete slab to the side of his garage, but the slab does not extend all the way to the street. So he invariably will drive some in the grass/dirt to get his truck parked on the slab. When the soil is wet, his truck will leave sizable ruts in the grass.

The project was simple in concept, and not too difficult to install. We measured the size for the extension, calculated the volume of material needed, went to Lowes to find the material, then started the work. As with any project, it is never as easy as you would like for it to be.

The hardest part was digging out the space. We had to dig down about 7 inches and it was all clay. Clay is very heavy and hard to work with, but we eventually got the hole fairly consistent.

By the time we were done with the clay, it was all over the place. You can see in one of the pictures that the driveway is covered in read from the clay. I actually turned one of my Give Blood shirts into a "dirt shirt" that day :).

The next step was to lay down about 5 inches of paver base, then about 1.5 inches of sand. The last part was laying the pavers and that was fun. We wished that we had a couple different sizes of pavers so we could have done a better pattern. However, the people at Lowe's were concerned that the longer pavers might break under the weight of his truck.

The last step was to pour a polymeric sand in the gaps of the pavers then water them into place. The sand is supposed to harden and prevent the pavers from shifting. Last time I checked, the sand had not really hardened completely, so either it will not really harden or we did something wrong. We were pretty impressed with the results though.

Thankfully, though, this is not a permanent job!

Click on any of the pictures to enlarge.