Over the reading break, we added a few key features to our property, water and gravel driveway. It sounds small but the coordination of an electrician, plumber, excavator operator and gravel truck driver was a big learning curve. Here are a few things I have learned:

Neighbours save the day! Always be kind to your neighbours as you will never know when you need to call them for help. When our skid steer rental fell through due to the snow we needed back up. Luckily our neighbour was able to juggle his work to help us out at a drop of the hat.

Gravel delivery timing is super important. The mud must be scraped out and graded to avoid puddles before the gravel arrives. It cant rain when all the fresh earth has been disturbed or else it wreck all the work. What made the timing interesting is we also had the electrician trench a line from the power pole across the driveway to the well where the pump was being installed. So, the driveway had to be in tack for the trucks to drive through but the electrician needed the sand delivered for the trench before covering it back up. Needless to say, we were lucky it worked out perfectly.

You can do all the math and research, but an expert’s opinion is crucial. We had ordered the amount of gravel from what we had measured and the size of the gravel we researched. Once the excavator operator showed up he was able to assess the land and let us know what would work better. An email to the gravel yard and a change in the order set everything straight.

Fail to plan, plan to fail. When there are many moving parts it is important to plan, we should have planned for everything, like snow on Vancouver Island and then planned a backup plan. This is a big learning process for us so we now know we have a lot more planning to do for our next steps. I think Trello will come in handy, so I have inputted what I think we need and I will ask an expert and someone with more experience than us to look it over for feedback.

 

After 4 days of work, we now have a place to park, work and play!

Gravel down

Photo by Emily Harris for CC