So you if you’ve read the earlier post about our driveway dramas, you’ll know it wasn’t a happy experience. The minimum specification for the driveway to comply with bylaws is a 20 cm cover of gravel on top of the crossover pipes. After 5 trips across our crossover the pipes were laid bare!
What wasn’t discussed in the last post was our contractor and his apparent disdain for trees. He’d offered to clear our old front fence line of star pickets and posts, using his bobcat when he’d finished the driveway. However, he needed wire cutters and and some overhead branches chainsawed back. No worries we said, it’s a two hour return journey to home to get them, but happy to do it…be back in two hours. Mistake!
When we returned there was our contractor with the full sized excavator knocking down trees! He’d already pulled all the post and wire out, leaving it all tangled in piles of tree trunks. Some of the dozen trees knocked down were ten year old beautiful healthy eucalypts, some poplars that were critical for saprophytic mushroom cultivation down the track and a lovely wattle shading our dam.
We spoke to him through gritted teeth and got him off the property as quickly as possible. Some of the trees are heartbreaking to lose and the amount of work to clear the debris far outweighs pulling out the posts manually. As we wrote earlier be careful who you chose. Anyway, after several phone calls in which he swore and evaded “I knew that would happen but it was an hour an a half each way and I just wanted to get home” was his final excuse. The excavations bore little resemblance to the design he was given (shown on the previous driveway post) and he knew it. So after a litany of excuses and complaints that it would cost him money, he finally turned up and fixed the crossover. Our advice is not to pay contractors in full up front or your leverage is greatly diminished.
We paid our contractor for materials, and the subcontractor he never mentioned he would have to use in our discussions prior, but not his fee for labour. We paid him the day after he finished the driveway and it was compliant. Aside from the noncompliance, entering or exiting the driveway was like being a monster truck race! There was no way a fire truck could have driven in there without bottoming. So in the end the shoddy work got fixed and we let our builders know that maybe they need to be more cautious with their recommendations.
So our first work on the land after eighteen months of wrangling council and hostile neighbours is now done. Next is the shed, we’ll put that in another post, and then the water bore. Hoping both are less stressful!
You can see below how much lower the driveway entrance is now
The driveable ends are dug in
and there are drainage trenches on either side to allow the flow of water away from the pipes
Angie appreciates the new driveway! Actually she had just been playing in the dam.
