The driveway at our Stratford house was never a thing of beauty but, as spring thaw hit in month three, it became obvious we had to add one more big item to the renovation list.

Pre-renovation, the driveway, which is at the side of the house (we are on a corner lot) leading to a side entrance, is a dirt/gravel number. We rented the house in summer months for the first three years we owned it and would come back to lots of weeds on the driveway perimeter untrod by tires, which I tried to tame using the pour-boiling-water-on-them method rather than blasting them with herbicides. The driveway provides enough space for two vehicles, one behind the other, and our neighbour’s drive is made of the same dirt/gravel, adjacent to ours with no barrier between.

I assumed when it came time many years from now to fix it up, the effort would need to be a joint one with our neighbours but landscapers we hired last year to lay patio stones in our side yard said it was possible to do something different with our side alone, if our neighbours didn’t have a driveway fix in their budget.

I have bad childhood memories of gravel driveways. We had a very long driveway in my childhood home that was set on 1.25-acre property, and a large tractor-with-snowblower would come in the winter to clear it out. That snowblower blew both snow and gravel bits across the lawn on either side. I did not look forward to the spring ritual of walking slowly back-and-forth across the lawn, bucket in hand, to pick gravel chunks out of the grass so they would not damage the lawn mower blades.

It was a happy day for me when that drive got paved in gleaming black asphalt.

Fast forward to spring equinox, 2023. After a month of a disposal bin on the Stratford house driveway, followed by daily trucks parked there for weeks after, the driveway is actually tilting toward the house. Potholes filled with muddy water comprise much of the surface now.

I’m less fond these days of that gleaming black asphalt: while it’s a practical road surface, for a driveway, it isn’t, well, pretty. Also, there’s a giant old maple right by the driveway and we thought a more flexible surface, permeable to rain, might be better. Flipping through articles and websites a few days ago (how did we research this stuff again before Google?) we came across this image.

“That would be good,” my partner said. With this kind of paver, you grow some kind of ground cover, whether a grass you mow, or clover. From a distance, when cars aren’t there, it looks like green space but has sturdy support for parking vehicles.

Unfortunately, our sleuthing hit a dead end when we tried to find someone in our community who installed such pavers.

We did what we always do when we’re stalled. We texted our contractor Jerry.

Jerry’s wide skillset is amazing but driveway builds are outside his scope. However, what Jerry can’t do himself, he can source other people to do.

As the spring thaw and rains came in earnest, it was clear the driveway compaction from our renovation project had slanted drainage toward our house: that part of our basement had more dampness in it than we’d seen in the previous three years.

So at this point, we have someone lined up to do the excavation, levelling, compacting and rebuilding a sickly looking window well alongside the existing driveway.

Miracle Jerry is still on the hunt for the right person to lay the paving stones (which he has sourced and priced at Ed’s Concrete here in Stratford) along with the soil and seeding infill. Our reserve funds will take a bigger-than-expected hit but it needed to be done, eventually. Turns out, eventually is now.