Paving The Driveway

Paving The Driveway

One of our neighbors is a developer, and mentioned a few months ago that he had paid about $1 per square foot to have the roads in his subdivision paved with asphalt. This was very exciting; our driveway is about 600 feet long, and a 10 foot wide driveway...why, that would only be about $6000. When we get the proceeds of the house in Boise, our thought was to go ahead, and use some of the money to have the driveway paved.

Asphalt driveways clear snow quite effectively. Once one part is exposed to sunlight, the asphalt absorbs energy, and pretty quickly, the rest of the surface clears. Some of our neighbors with asphalt driveways are clear in a few hours--while those of us with rock and dirt driveways take days.

A reasonably smooth driveway would also be faster to clear with the snowthrower, and with less rocks getting into (and breaking) the mechanism.

So we started making some calls--and the company that did our neighbor the developer's roads wasn't available--too many commercial calls as we approach snow season.

So I started calling other pavers--and the vast majority don't even return phone calls.

Those that do respond, however, are talking about $2.25 per square foot--which is suddenly not so cheap. In addition, we were looking at getting the back driveway done as well, and the big spot in front of the house, not just the driveway. But then we are talking about 10,000 square feet--or more like $22,500. Whoa, that's getting up to a point where I am reminded of the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of the Indian rajah who takes pity on the suffering of his people, walking the roads in bare feet, and orders all the roads covered in leather--and an advisor suggests that it would be cheaper to give all his subjects shoes, instead.

We asked about using reground asphalt (which would give me brownie points for recycling). One paver indicated that this would be more like $1.25 per square foot--and that for five years or so, it would probably work okay, although it would be less attractive. The other paver indicated that he stopped doing reground asphalt, because it just didn't do a very good job--customers were complaining pretty quickly about it shedding rocks.

So, in the tradition of that Indian rajah's advisor, I am wondering if it might make more sense to buy a small snowplow instead--something that we could ride while clearing the driveway--with the added advantage that we could use it to clear the rest of the road out to the old highway. It wouldn't look as nice, and it wouldn't let me get the Corvette in and out, but until the snows are largely gone, the Corvette is just, as my wife calls it, "the tart": looks hot, but not very useful!

There are several categories of snowplows:

1. There are blades that go on the front of your SUV. Positive: relatively cheap ($1000 to $1500). Downside: these are light duty, at least when mounted on the wife's TrailBlazer, and I'm not sure if there are some legal issues involved with driving one of these on public roads. You certainly don't want to put this on and off a lot. Install it in December: remove it in March (or maybe April, here).

2. There are snowplow attachments for ATVs. Positive: if the snow is really deep, and you can't get the TrailBlazer up the driveway, you walk up, start the ATV, and plow the driveway. Negative: One more item to maintain; maybe not enough power to take a very deep cut. And the blades are usually not very wide, so it might take a couple of passes even for relatively shallow snow.

3. I think that there may be purpose-built snowplows, but I'm not sure what they are called. I suspect that they aren't cheap.

4. It might make sense to find out who does snow plowing for a living around here, and ask what they charge to do it. If someone charges me $50 each time I need the driveway and road cleared--and they do it thirty times a season--that's $1500. We could live here at least 15 years and barely reach the cost of a 10,000 square foot driveway.