Driveway

To my surprise I could have built the building even larger than I did without needing any sort of variance from the Town (or County). Unfortunately I had overlooked what I thought was a small detail…a driveway!

It turns out due to (in my opinion) poorly written rules you need a variance to add a second driveway no matter how large your property is or how much street frontage you have. That is to say the same rules applied to me with well over 300 feet of street frontage stretched across my corner lot as would a house with only 40′ of street frontage. I had to plead my case at TWO town board meetings and only with the support of the town clerk and building inspector was I able to win the town board over. Whew, crisis averted!

In my original budget I figured there would be plenty of money left over for a paved driveway but since I was way over budget that was not the case. I decided to have a gravel driveway put in and live with that for a few years then circle back and get it paved. After the snow melted and I started using the gravel driveway I quickly hated it. I think because you have to turn a 90 degree angle to get into the shop every car would track in a TON of gravel and just make a disaster inside the shop.

I decided to re-prioritize and get a paved driveway installed sooner than later. I decided on asphalt over concrete for two reasons: The first is that I knew with the 90 degree turn into the shop there would always be tire marks on the concrete. The other is that since it is a shop I would probably leak fluids or otherwise damage the driveway over time and it is much easier to repair asphalt and keep it looking good.

I started calling around and was all but ready to sign a contract with a place but one of the examples they gave me to look at had a crooked line that bothered me a lot and they refused to agree in writing that my driveway wouldn’t look like that. I ended up going with the place that did my neighbor’s shop driveway 20 years earlier as it still looked good.

When I signed the contract they said the asphalt plants didn’t start until early May and they had some projects ahead of me so it would be done in early June. I put 50% down in early April eagerly awaiting having my driveway in early June. June came and went in spite of me calling once a week to inquire the status and FINALLY July 19th they showed up!

Just like the concrete I was VERY pleased with how it turned out. So glad I didn’t go with the other company.