New Driveway

About a month ago we received a letter from the city of Fairway stating that our sidewalks were going to be replaced and widened to meet ADA standards. One of our long term goals for the house has always been to put in a circle driveway, but after receiving this letter we decided that it would be easiest if we went ahead and moved it up on the list of things to do. Adding the circle driveway is important because we live on a pretty busy road between two curves. Currently the driveway is not big enough to turn around in, so we're always backing out onto the busy street. We'll also have more room for visitors to park since we do not have any street parking.









In the process of laying our new driveway we realized that the current driveway angles away from the property line and in turn we waste a lot of yard space. We decided to realign the driveway with the property line and shift the entrance to the main driveway west. With the help of my favorite civil engineer, Kira Wylam, I put together a set of drawings and had them approved by the city.





Since we are planning to do a lot of construction to the house we are not going to redo the driveway near the house at this time. Here's the construction drawing for the existing driveway with the portion of the driveway that we are redoing highlighted:








Below is the drawing showing the new driveway:








We had several contractors bid the project with the hopes that the contractor redoing the city's sidewalks would be cheaper since they were already mobilized and setup to perform concrete work in our neighborhood. Unfortunately they were siginificantly more expensive so we went with a different contractor. However, the contractor we chose will also be doing some foundation work for us in the basement so it is a good fit.



Here are a few photos of the new sidewalks. As you can tell the new entrance doesn't match the old driveway so it's a little tricky to pull in and out right now, but we're hoping get this project underway in the next few weeks.






























To save money we removed all of the trees and bushes in the area where we are realigning the new driveway. Just cutting down all of those trees made our lot feel a lot bigger. I'm really excited to see how open it feels once we get the new driveway in.