So, the never ending project that is our house roared to life again this week. We're trying to change our property ownership to a city verses county (we live in the city, only four of us are zoned county out of hundreds). Anyway, this requires inspections. Inspectors come and tell us what we know. You have a water problem in the middle of your driveway, you'll need to get this corrected. Yay for overflowing springs and no drought. Boo for underwater springs that have been eroding the integrity of our driveway and pooling into a nice muddy puddle for years. Our driveway has always been something of an oddity, but lately it's been more like Swamp Thing than a driveway. Spring rains are unforgiving.
It's fun to watch people park at our house these days. They'll people park in front of the house, beside the house, in the street, four houses down and in the bushes, in the middle of the interstate, really just about anywhere but in our driveway. So, this week, we decided to do something positive about it. You know, make a conscious effort to improve the quality of every one's experience when visiting (and trying to eliminate the fresh mud that slings onto my car every single time I leave or come back to the house). Our intentions were noble, humble, even patriotic in this time of recession - we'll spend for the good! We felt good about ourselves. We were fixing something the right way and not just covering up a problem. It's amazing we could get out of the house with our egos, but we managed.
We found a guy who could do what we needed for the price we were looking for. He and his "crew" (this means wife and friend) worked all day. About 2 hours before I was to come home, I got a picture. I should have wondered when I received it, but I believed that it was going all right. But the image of the two foot wall of dirt in the middle of our driveway weighed on me. I casually called Mace to ask if we'd thought to cover the driveway before we covered the entire driveway in 2 feet of mud. Got any guesses about his response? I got home after dark so it looked like everything had worked out. We paid the guy and his "crew" and I drove into my garage. I noticed some additional dirt on my tires, but really thought nothing of it. It was different than what I expected, but looked all right - IN THE DARK. It was the next morning before I saw the entire picture. As the sun moved up in the sky and the birds were chirping and we were drinking our coffee, the disaster came into full display.
This is not the actual driveway, but a dramatization of the events described belowMud was everywhere and I mean everywhere (ok, so maybe it wasn't that bad, but close). You might now be thinking, well, it'll wash away in time. No, no, you would be thinking incorrectly. It is not the kind you can just wash away. It's the kind that is going to stick around for awhile because, you see, when we built the house we remembered everything EXCEPT that the garage was about 30 inches higher than the driveway...oops (smart cookies I tell you). So we improvised as we did not have an additional $15K sitting around to fix our mistake and we laid gravel instead. This gave us immediate access at a tenth of the cost.
It's all coming together for you now isn't it? Yeah, this mud, it's sitting on a nice partially graveled driveway, mostly broken to pieces driveway. No we can't pressure wash it without sending deadly projectiles throughout the surrounding neighborhood (maybe a good idea if we didn't like our neighbors, but we do). We discussed the possibility of using a hose and less intense sprayer, but it occurred to us that it would take exactly 150 years to clean it this way (and we really don't need additional water -
see underground spring sentence above). So I looked out of the window in the early morning after all of the work had been done and sighed. I turned around to face Mason and asked in a defeated tone, "So when is something we pay to have done actually going to make things look better and not create more work for us?" He just shrugged his shoulders and laughed. So we have a nice retaining pool for the spring at the end of the driveway, mud flipping everywhere, muddy rocks everywhere, a further broken driveway
(heavy machinery used to create retaining pool added new broken spots), but by god we do not have water pooling in the middle of our driveway anymore. Take that city appraisal inspector guy!
Instead, now we've got...well....yes, never mind.
