Between our house at 100 Prince Street and our neighbours toward the water at 98 Prince Street is our driveway and, on their side of the property line, a strip of sidewalk that leads to their backyard.
When we bought the house in 2000 our asphalt driveway was already in sorry shape, and in the years since it has only gotten worse, due a combination of freeze-thaw action, our car parking on it, and the occasional piece of heavy equipment driving over it.
We’ve been talking to our neighbours Karen and Angus about doing something about the driveway for a couple of years, and Angus, an engineer, perfectionist, and great lover of the neighbourhood, took it upon himself to adopt this as his personal mission this summer.
Over the last 3 days, Angus and his son Henry, and Henry’s friend Jacob, have, through sheer strength of will and back, turned the former asphalt driveway into rubble, leaving us with a fresh canvas for a new poured-concrete creation that Angus has fixed in his imagination.
Before the concrete gets poured, we’re going to have a mason in to look at the also-crumbling brickwork that makes up the top 2 feet of our foundation, but that should be (we hope) quick work, and, assuming Angus maintains his frenetic pace, we should be parking on a new driveway by month’s end.
Comments
I demoed a lane of my concrete driveway here in Portland, just to be rid of it, but the city encourages everybody to replace impermeable driveways with permeable ones that will let water infiltrate and not just feed the surface flood of stormwater the tends to dump all kinds of chemicals and debris into local streams. Some people use a high tech concrete and others down hollow cinderblocky stones, so you end up with sort of a concrete lattice. But maybe those don't survive well all of your freezing and thawing, and they might be hell to shovel.