In April the snow melted and we got a better look at the road... which was a proper mess! The road in has 6 culverts you drive over, but there is a seventh giving road access to the capped well. This last culvert wasn't doing well, the road was sinking over the culvert and I decided to try tackling the ditch on the side the water flows in, open it up so the water will drain better. You will discover that we eventually just removed the culvert, fun video of that in another post.
This is how it looked before
And after
This was a lot of digging and cutting trees
I got a little dirty
Went by a little later and there was a happy frog!
A few days later I worked on the 6th culvert. I didn't get a before photo, just this after shot...
Mostly what I did was build up rocks and dirt at the end of this culvert to make the road wider.
Later that same day I noticed the 2nd culvert on the way in, which is the biggest, had this going on inside...
So there are two culverts that meet in the middle. Not a big deal we thought until later when I found a hole in the road where I could see this water flowing. That's a job for another post.
In May we finally cracked open a bottle of honey mead we were saving to celebrate getting land and sat to have lunch out there for the first time.
We got busy working on the first culvert...
As the snow melted we realized half the road was sticks and logs
We had to pull all of these out, there were pine boughs in here and it was a mess!
This is after we pulled everything out
Matthew brought in slate from a source on our land and I did my best to build a rock walk to support the material we were going to put in. Matthew would use the tractor to deliver more slate that I layered as evenly as possible, then bring dirt and I would smooth it out over the slate.
This was the end result. These days it blends with the rest of the road and has been holding up well. The true test will be seeing how it does in mud season.
By this time we initiated talks with Unity homes, the company we are building with. They needed to see the condition of the road to determine if they could get in. We took a video of the road from where we were planning to build. I thought I'd share so you could see most of the driveway and the condition of the road, it's a lot better now.
We are now building in a different location even further in so our drive will be a little longer than this. It's better overall, the new site has a great view, it overlooks the pond and is drier for building than where we were thinking of. Great to have professionals to tell you whats what. The next video was a day we went out to play with our new toy. The tractor came with the bucket, and we bought a rear blade to use for regrading the road. It happened to be snowing when we got to the land, but it cleared up later.
I didn't get video or photos of the final product, my bad. It looked a lot better, it was a little lumpy and I later went over it again with the blade and smoothed it out more. You can only get it so nice with the blade though. We are talking about getting a box blade which would make it way smoother... and toys hehe I don't have photos of it but the rest of the month I did some road grading and we filled the hole I found at the second culvert with concrete. It took about 6 bags of concrete, first Matthew crawled into the culvert and built a rock wall over the hole to keep the concrete from getting into the water. Towards the end of May it got really warm and I went for my first swim in our pond!
It was a good day.
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