There are just so many wonderful things about living in the country! The quiet, the fresh air, the trees all around, the chickens, the elbow room. However, one of the things that has been a bit of a drag in our almost ten years of living on this "little patch of Heaven way out west" (shout out to one of our family's favorite movies, "Home on the Range"!) is not having a paved road. Now don't get me wrong. I'm SO grateful for a road! And after Michael and Josiah came home from their mission trip to Mexico, one of the first things Josiah said was "Wow, our road was like a dream after driving those "roads" in Mexico!". So I know what it could be or not be. It's not all dirt, which equals mud after our rains. It's not full of holes. Grateful for that. But it IS dusty, (as our cars and floors testify) and after heavy or hard rains, the gravel washes out and has on a number of occasions left HUGE ruts that make the driveway almost impossible to drive down. When we were renting, we would just call our landlord and he would come and take a tractor and boxblade and regrade the driveway. That was certainly a rental perk! But with home ownership comes not only equity, but responsibility. Thankfully, I've got just the right guy for that task! He is not only responsible, he's creative. He's brainstormed and tried different ideas for how to keep the gravel from washing away and leaving those dreaded trenches. After months of thinking (and thankfully not too much rain) he came up with a plan. This plan involved another great thing about living in the country...your friends have tractors! 😀 He called over a friend from church who has a tractor. Paul drove his tractor over from his place about 5 miles away. Yep, that's the country, folks. Driving the tractor down the highway. So Paul came and dug trenches. I will admit that I thought, "15 years ago we would have had a group of four boys squatting down right by the driveway with eyes GLUED to the tractor thinking it was SO COOL that Mr. Paul was here with his tractor and moving the dirt around!"
Here's Paul and Michael going over the plan. I honestly wouldn't have even been able to tell you what the plan exactly was. Clearly, not an engineer here!
So, he dug a huge trench to pull the water away from the area between the sidewalk and the house so to divert it away from the house toward the other side of the property.
You can see how he's dragging the blade to create the trench. In the process, there were SO.MANY.ROCKS!! Big rocks, small, rocks, medium rocks. Rocks EVERYWHERE! This is kinda the theme of our property. Always rocks...always rocks! I guess we should be glad that our "house is built upon a rock", that's wise right?!
Here are some of the rocks and the trench that was dug. So my ingenious husband has been collecting and filling up buckets and buckets of rocks because in addition to the big trench by the house, Paul also dug trenches down the driveway so Michael could fill them with medium rocks that would help water move but not wash away the smaller gravel. So there are little mini French drain, type things all along our driveway like this one.
The wonderful news...it works!! In fact just the day after all the work was done we had a huge storm and the road stood up beautifully to it. How huge was that storm? Well so huge it blew over this big cedar tree on the side of our house!
Yep, that's a big tree which left a BIG hole. We were fine, We didn't actually even hear the tree fall during the storm. Which begs the question...did it make a sound?! 😉 What will we do about the tree and the hole...stay tuned. I have big plans!
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