This post is about driveways. Boring, expensive, but necessary. The driveway at Langi Billin is complete, just in time for a global shelter in. Given what’s happening in the world, writing about making things to drive on seems more than a bit trivial, nonetheless we are keeping our commitment to document as we go.
A grader, an excavator and a bobcat. Seems a lot for a strip of gravel right? Well read on there’s a whole lot more!
So for starters before you even get going you will need to apply to your local council for a permit to create access across the road verge. In council speak this is called a crossover. If you contact your local council building department (not planning) they will be able to advise you of the size of the drainage pipe you will need to use under your driveway crossover (get this in writing!). In our case council specified a 375mm diameter pipe, sufficient to handle a 1 in 100 year flood. To be honest if water ever reaches the location at which our driveway enters the property and needs to flow under, a drainage pipe is going to be the least of our concerns! However, when dealing with councils, logic or reasonableness is an aside, if you want to proceed legally then you must meet their requirements no matter how silly.
Just as a cheeky aside, we spent considerable time going back through VCAT and local government planning decisions while we waited nervously for a council decision on our planning application. It would not be unreasonable to say that cases where residents had proceeded and then applied for retrospective approval of their activities, they were more frequently successful in their applications than those like us who followed the rules. Particularly so if you were a well resourced developer it seems. This in no way suggests that you should do anything other than that which you are legally obliged to do, just don’t expect councils to be helpful simply because you are doing the right thing.
Now these bad boys are the pipes and what are termed “driveable ends”. They are a tonne each of concrete and steels bars costing nearly a thousand dollars each…ouch…we hadn’t budgeted for that! Warning though the pipes you see are not correct as delivered. They are both the same i.e. they both have a flange at one end. However they need a plain end to slot into the driveable end…see the problem? The earthmoving contractor had to phone a mate to swap one over at our expense…the supplier will be getting a bill for that!
This what they look like when they are in the ground. Now this is only a part of the story. If your land is covered by bushfire overlay and much of Victoria is, then you need to a. comply with CFA requirements for the driveway and b. get written approval from the CFA for the siting and plan view design of your driveway. In our case the driveway needed to able to carry a 10 tonne truck and had be topped with a 100mm deep crushed rock (recycled concrete would have also been OK and indeed preferable. Our contractor however was not quite so on board); a dirt track will not comply!
The driveway clear space had to be 4 metres wide and the gravel topped strip had be centered and 3 metres wide. Additionally unless the driveway was to be a loop – which we originally intended until we got the prices for the driveable ends – then we needed to have a circular turn around of 10 metres diameter measured from the outside of the gravel to the outside of the opposite side of the loop. You can see our loop below;
For application to council you will need to supply a standard engineering drawing. Don’t freak out they are not actually that hard to do. We used Google draw. This is the link to an example standard drawing. They don’t need to be to scale but measurements in mm need to be shown. Here are our drawings for council;
You’ll note that the two drains away from the ends of the pipes aren’t dug in on the picture above. More on that and some advice on supervising contractors later. The pipes also need to extend 1400mm beyond the gravel strip on either side, making for a 4800mm long pipe run plus the length of the driveable ends; you need a lot of room!
Now the part of the application process that would make Kafka proud; we had to specify a date on which the work was to be done (pus nominate a contractor) but council gave no indication or guarantees how long it would take them to bother approving our application. In the end it took increasingly firm emails and telephone calls in the days immediately before the contractor was booked, for council to do their job and assess the application. They did so with a couple of days to spare in the end, and to be honest we are not sure they even looked at the design. There is a fee as well, it depends on the council and the circumstance. Ours was about $130.
Now contractors – our advice is be there every step of the way! What should have happened, we believe, with our crossover, as the drawing showed, was to dig the ends in deeper and cut two drains to allow the release of water. Because our contractor didn’t do this and we were too late to stop him we now have a driveway entrance that is impractically steep and high. There are bigger worries in the world and we are trying not to get bent out of shape about something, that for us, was a lot of money and is not right. However. if council inspect the driveway and reject it our contractor will be finding himself in court if he is not prepared to redo the work at his expense. The unfortunate problem you’ll face is that contractors in the bush are not that easy to find, have minimal competition and even recommendations don’t necessarily guarantee their competence. Tread with care!
Random Pro Tip – Langi Bilin had a pre-existing shed on a concrete pad. The shed was destroyed in the Black Saturday fires, we bought a flatpack shed to put on the pad to start moving equipment to the land. Unfortunately it was delivered incomplete and couldn’t be erected. While we were waiting for the rest of the shed some nice human cut the chain on the gate, backed up a truck and stole the entire shed! Object lesson there; just because things are out of sight and you’re in the middle of nowhere don’t assume they won’t get nicked.