Driveway Work, Part 1

This is what our upper driveway looked like on Thursday before we got started. There's wood behind the Bobcat that needed to be moved, a large mulch pile next to the RV that also needed to be moved, and the mound in the center leftover from the tree we took down needed to be leveled. In front of the cars is the future carport area that needs to be cleared and prepped.

These logs were left where they lay because they were too heavy for me to manhandle into the lawn tractor trailer. It was a pretty simple task to load them into the bucket of the Bobcat and move them down by the treehouse. After we spread the mulch, we'll set the logs on end to make a stepping log path in the woods.

The mulch pile is deceptive. It doesn't look too big until you consider that it's on a slope and is actually much taller. It was dumped by a local tree company last fall and this was the best place to put it at the time, even though we actually need the mulch on the other side of the house. We moved some of it by hand, but it was just too big a job to do that way. It went so much faster (and so much less sweat was involved) to move it with the Bobcat. The mulch is now in a pile between the treehouse and trampoline, partially spread around, partially smooshed into the ground. We'll have to finish spreading by hand, once the ground dries out. Not looking forward to that one....

Some logs were uncovered as the mulch was moved, so I used the chainsaw to cut them down to moveable chunks.

I also tidied up the top of a tree we felled that's staying where it is (you can see it in the second pic, behind the log chunks waiting to be moved). We hauled out the smaller, top branches and left the main trunk in place in the woods. There's still a couple of log pieces that need to be hauled away, but it now looks much tidier.

Then I tidied up the backside of the garden shed, where downed branches had been laying around for the last year. We'd had a couple big, dead branches cut off the big tree next to the shed when we had the tree next to the driveway taken down, but we left them laying where they fell. I forgot to take a before pic, but here's the after, looking much better.

I'm not super happy about how large our wood and brush pile is getting, but for now it can't be helped. One of these days we'll rent the biggest wood chipper available and run as much of the wood pile through it as we can. All the half-decayed logs should go through without any problems, which will leave a much smaller pile of green wood that needs to be burned.

I finally built boxes for our raised garden beds. We bought cedar fence pickets for the project last spring, but never got around to building the boxes or planting anything. We'll level the garden area with the Bobcat, which will make it much easier to get the beds uniform and level the first time.

The boxes are upside down- the corner posts will go in the ground to keep them in place. The pile of dirt will be used to help fill the boxes, but is currently in the way of where one of the boxes will go.

While I was doing all that, Sunshine and Mr M were taking turns hauling logs and mulch and digging out that mound in the center of the driveway. It ended up taking a full day to dig out the root ball in the center. We knew this might happen, but it was still frustrating. The nearly bald tires on the Bobcat didn't help speed up the project. 

We now have a huge crater in the middle of the driveway.

They started to fill in the crater with the dirt they'd piled next to it, but still needed more to finish leveling the area. They had just started moving dirt from the carport area to the crater when a big storm moved in. A couple hours later another storm moved through. And the next afternoon (Sunday) we had another soaker. The high clay content of our driveway has never been so obvious. It's so wet and taking forever to drain and dry out.

That's as much progress as we made the first few days. I'll do another post soon with the rest of what we did.