A project that the collective neighborhood had been looking at this summer is some extensive repairs to our private road. Being private, it gets no county upkeep so we are on our own and over the last 2 years, the road surface had become an obstacle course of pot holes, big and small. Only a day after getting back from Lake Gaston I was rolling the trash cans back up the drive way when I could hear construction equipment in the direction of St. Margaret’s Rd. I wandered up there to see what was going on and low and behold, they were resurfacing within 100 yards of Duvall. Naturally it couldn’t hurt to ask what their plan was with the millings. They had been taking them several miles away which took some additional time for the dump truck drivers. I tossed out the idea of dumping a few loads at the end of Duvall, and they were happy to give me as much as we wanted. We had been looking at purchasing delivered truckloads, probably 2-3 for about $250 each… this little deal gave us 7 loads for free and the truck drivers saved a couple collective hours of driving in total… win-win.
Now that we have somewhere around 140 TONS of material on the road, we decided it would be best to rent real, purpose-built equipment to deal with the workload instead of beating my little Kubota to death (which it certainly would have done). So two weeks later, we rented a Bobcat Skid Steer and a vibratory roller to hopefully make a reliable longer lasting road surface . It took all weekend of moving, dumping, smoothing and rolling, but we finally chewed away at the monstrous piles along Duvall. We each got to drive the various equipment, but I spent most of the time in the skid steer since I had run one a couple times before and was proficient at it. We also implemented our new (to us) dump trailer by loading it up and then spreading loads of it down the road and it certainly expedited the process.
While the finished surface may not be as silky smooth as an airport tarmac, we are all quite proud of how we managed to re-coat the entire 1/4 mile of surface by ourselves in one weekend for less than $1k.
