The driveway was one of our first priorities with the landscaping, since we couldn't really park our cars in the garage without creating some kind of traversable pathway from the road. Never wanting to do things half-heartedly (or spend money on something that we'd only be digging up later), we opted not to go for a cheap loose-rock option, and to build the real thing straight away.
We explored the possibility of concreting the driveway, and immediately got scared off by the price, so then we started asking ourselves if we thought we were up to the task of paving it. We decided to give it a go. Tom found some factory second pavers in a very similar colour to our house brick at a fantastic price, so we ordered a few pallets of them and got to work.
Not before having some very lengthy conversations about the design though! I had my heart set on a sweeping curve that would enable us to start the driveway fairly small at the road, and then curve out to a double-car-sized area near the garage. Aside from the fact that curviness is attractive (and with so many stark lines in the design of the actual house and the rest of our garden I thought it would be nice to mix it up a bit), this idea performed the very important role of maximising non-driveway space that could be made into garden. After all, the house is pretty bare and un-frilly, so we really needed as many plants as possible soften it a bit.
Poor Tom wasn't too keen on the idea, since obviously it would involve a lot more work than a straight up-and-down driveway, but unfortunately for him he had nothing to counter my "but it will be so much prettier this way" argument with. So we got to work with my curvy driveway, employing the age-old trick of positioning the hose to get the curve right.
Tom then managed to get a work acquaintance to come and dig up the dirt for us, since with paving you need to have a layer of compacted road base and then a layer of sand that you pave on top of, so that the pavers have a nice solid platform to rest on (with a bit of flexibility in the sand), and obviously we had to fit all of this in so that the driveway was the same height as the floor of the garage at one end and the curb at the other.
This resulted in two giant piles of dirt on the footpath (which the council wasn't too happy about).
We then ordered in a mountain of road base, which was interesting, since the truck got bogged in the soft dirt of the driveway and we had to hand-shovel the roadbase out of the truck to lighten its load enough to allow it to drive out again. We borrowed a compactor from another of Tom's work acquaintances, and compacted all of the roadbase. And then we got the sand in and went through the same process (fortunately that truck didn't get bogged).
It was then a matter of carefully working out the levels and slope of the driveway, so it would drain to the right places, and be a smooth surface (which we had to get a bit of professional help for to make sure we got it right). And then Tom got tiling! I exercised my "but it will be so much prettier this way" argument again by insisting that we lay the pavers diagonally, instead of in straight up-and-down lines. In retrospect, this was a great decision, since not only does it look better, but it's a much more forgiving pattern when it comes to keeping all of the lines straight (particularly on a slope), and again it's a bit of a contrast from the very straight vertical and horizontal lines of the house.
Here's Tom shedding light on the subject after the first day of paving.
Checking out his handiwork. Like our very professional (and effective) outdoor lighting solution?
And the view from a bit further inside the garage. Tom's dinner is sitting on the compactor in the foreground.
Here's more of a close-up of the paving on that night, with Tom's slightly hazardous string line running across it.
Allie testing out the reliability of the surface.
The view from the driveway across to the rest of the front yard.
And here's more of a close-up. It was about at this moment that I decided to really make a nuisance of myself, since I hadn't realised that there was such variation in the colour of the pavers until then (that's what happens when you get seconds). I really wasn't very impressed with the hodge podge of colour, and was worried that we wouldn't be able to make the driveway look consistent if we didn't strike the same mix of colour in each of the palettes.
So, I came up with a solution. To Tom's frustration it involved un-paving a lot of what he'd already done. I suggested that we reserve all of the lighter coloured pavers to run in a single strip up each side of the driveway, thus creating a feature out of what would have been a bit unsightly otherwise.
And so we did.
There was still variation in the darker-coloured pavers, but without the whitest of the pavers mixed in with them, it all looked much better.
Here I am with plugs in my ears. It was my job to measure and cut all of the pavers to fill the gaps along the curvy edge where there wasn't room for full pavers. Only fair I suppose, since I was the one that insisted on the curvy edge in the first place.
The paving progressed nicely, and then we hit our next problem. Our water meter. The water meter is council property, and has to be accessible for them to come and read it every quarter to charge us appropriately. Our water meter was smack bang in the middle of where we wanted to pave our driveway. Not only was it where we wanted our driveway, but it was also inside our property's front boundary, which is not usually the case.
Tom had tried countless times at this stage to call the council and ask them to relocate the meter so that we didn't have to deal with it, but had no success. Six weeks later we really really wanted to get our driveway finished, so we got creative yet again.
We purchased a giant heavy-duty plastic drainage pit that we cut the bottom out of to fit it over the water metre. We then temporarily positioned some concrete blocks around the gaping hole so that we didn't get roadbase and sand falling into it.
Of course it was when we'd already reached this stage that one morning when I was about to leave to work, I came out the front door to discover two council workers armed with shovels standing next to our water meter and starting to dig into our carefully compacted sand. Needless to say, I panicked, and immediately demanded that they stop. After a very very long and confusing discussion, I realised that these guys were responding to an order that had been placed six weeks ago by Tom to have the meter relocated. Too late! We were already committed to our water meter plan, we had half our driveway paved, and nobody was digging it up! So we managed to cancel the council order and proceeded. With minor delays for storms.
We also bought some heavy duty black plastic drains to position at the low end of the driveway so that any water would have somewhere to drain to, and we bought some chocolate coloured cement to concrete them in. We figured it would look nicer than ordinary coloured cement next to our brownish coloured pavers. It makes the driveway look much more cohesive I think, although we never quite got the colour perfect.
We also used the same coloured concrete to concrete in a nice square around our water meter box.
Nearly there!
Allie asleep on the job, as usual.
Tom rolling out the all-important string to keep everything as straight as possible.
The view looking the other way, where you can see our concreted-in water meter box a bit better.
We also had to replace some of the council footpath, since all the builder's trucks had cracked the existing footpath.
Allie of course had to come and check that the standard of work was up to scratch.
"Dad, I think you need to recut this paver"
The final step was to get a steel plate cut to the right size to be a lid for our water metre, and then to glue pavers on top of it to match the line of the driveway.
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