building for our future

Yesterday at about 6pm ET, the two fine young men from Andy Connolly Paving completed the installation of the new driveway. (The required paving down by the road needs to wait a few weeks until things settle) These guys did a great job and our new “country lane” will likely be one of the outstanding highlights of our property into the future.

We did have a few “exciting moments” early on when the crew sunk the back end of their tri-axle (a big truck...) in the mud, blocking half of the road and an uniformed township official tried to stop work over “lack of proper permitting”, but all was quickly resolved. The truck got towed out and a quick stop at the township office ascertained that the roadmaster who approved the project back in early March (!) never shuffled the paperwork from the second floor to the first. Consequently, it was not in the system.

At any rate, the new drive is a pleasure to use and will greatly increase the safety of ingress and egress relative to the heavy traffic on the state road that borders our property. A few pictures are posted below for your enjoyment.
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View after making the left turn toward the house

Dirt is moving...with some help, of course from a big yellow machine. Driveway time, boys and girls! Workers from Andy Connolly Paving arrived on Monday morning to get started and continued work today, the day after the US Independence Day holiday. Tomorrow they will be laying stone after cutting out the last few feet to the state road that borders our property. There is no doubt in my mind that outside of some wicked weather that they will be completed by the end of the week.

Along the way, they’ve come up with a few “pebbles” that needed to be move...quite a few, in fact, but in one sense it’s a blessing as those same rocks will be very nice features in the gardens along the new driveway. Some people pay big-bucks for them...here, we grow ’em right on the property!



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We also “finalized” the floor plans and elevations with our architect and gave the go-ahead for the necessary drawing set(s) to procede with permitting once we choose a builder. We have a good sense of who that will be, but are waiting on two additional preliminary quotes from the same early specifications as a sanity check. We really like the builder that we’ve been talking with, however, and they are well suited to this kind of job.

So our mission will soon turn into figuring out how we’re going to pay for this project, given that neither the Prize Patrol nor a winning Power-Ball ticket have made an appearance in our lives.