Gravel driveway help

You absolutely need "grade work" with asphalt or concrete.

I recommend that you consult a local geotechnical engineer that is licensed in OH. Ask for a gravel road section design with borrow ditches. This will include instruction for subbase and agg base thickness, subgrade compaction, cross slope, etc. The geotech will also be knowledgeable on the drainage. Ideally, the borrow ditch will infiltrate, but if the native soils do not percolate, you'll have to find some way for the borrow ditches to discharge to the historical drainage paths.

A competent contractor can use this design to build a road along the alignment you choose.
 
Also, judging by the photos, you'll need to strip and haul off topsoil in order to remove the organic materials.
 
I can't find a rock in any of your pics and my experience with any higher clays soil.....especially where it can rain hard and long is that anything you can do for soil separation is money in the bank. Geo's are expensive, but so is rock replacement.....and will you get dinged for a loss of silt to a flowing stream?

What I would add is the power co will use the easement to access their lines. They only benefit from a road....they will travel the line anyways....so why make two separate roads?
 
I am not a construction guy, i can't build for shit, But I do live on a long dirt driveway. Do it right the first time if not, you will be sorry.
 
IdahoBeav said:
You absolutely need "grade work" with asphalt or concrete.

I recommend that you consult a local geotechnical engineer that is licensed in OH. Ask for a gravel road section design with borrow ditches. This will include instruction for subbase and agg base thickness, subgrade compaction, cross slope, etc. The geotech will also be knowledgeable on the drainage. Ideally, the borrow ditch will infiltrate, but if the native soils do not percolate, you'll have to find some way for the borrow ditches to discharge to the historical drainage paths.

A competent contractor can use this design to build a road along the alignment you choose.
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I meant with no grade work that would be an added expense i was not figuring. Asphalt and concrete are only as good as the base they are placed on.
 
KurtR said:
Lets for fun say you were going to pave it. 600x10 with 4" of aspahlt is right around 146 tons and i only know prices around here and its roughly 130-160 per ton in place and thats with no grade work. So it would be some where in the 20 k range to have it paved. If you were to go concrete which i think is better way less up keep than asphalt your looking at 74 yards at 4" right around 40k in place also with no grade work. Going through those numbers makes that 44k for just grading and rock seem a little high.
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Our typical driveway section is 3" over 4". Pickup up mix $68-72 per ton. In place $20-24 per SY. I calc'd 300x12', 154pcf, .93 compaction, 65T of HMA.

I agree, Concrete>Asphalt for driveways 100%.
 
Danny Hoey said:
Our typical driveway section is 3" over 4". Pickup up mix $68-72 per ton. In place $20-24 per SY. I calc'd 300x12', 154pcf, .93 compaction, 65T of HMA.

I agree, Concrete>Asphalt for driveways 100%.
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In the less harsh climates i could see 3" working. Might get away with it here if you used some higher polymer mixes but they are a pain in the ass and add cost. Its 95.00 to pick asphalt up at here at the plant but we dont sell to fly by nighters to keep them out of the country.

People look up front and see how much cheaper the asphalt is but they dont figure in the crack filling and chip sealing every 3 or 4 years if you want it to stay nice.
 
Going to mirror some comments above. We need an aerial view with the proposed road layout to understand things better. Water can come from a long ways away pending the individual drainage areas.

In general I think you would want culverts/ditches to control the drainage. Keeping the subgrade drained will go a long ways.

Make sure you stabilize and get something growing immediately on the disturbed slopes as well. It won’t be the end all to erosion but will help. If you don’t do that and have culverts/ditches all the silt is going to fill both of those up. You may want to have some permanent check dams or something in the ditches pending their final slopes.

Also keep in mind culverts and ditches aren’t maintenance free. I’d personally avoid going across that side hill if possible but that may not be a hill you want to die given who wants the road there.

If the contractor doesn’t need the stripped topsoil take it to the proposed house location and use it for shaping/drainage up there. Make them build the house 8-12” higher than they think they need and get everything moving away from that. Our current place barely has positive drainage (after we fixed all the negative drainage) since they built it so low even though our entire lot drains well.
 
Personally, I would find a CE with some road experience and pay them 1000$ to come out, look at the site and make some recommendations. I can tell you how we do it in MT, but your soils are probably quite different and I imagine you get way more precipitation, both of which directly impact everything.

Someone that knows what they are doing will prob save you $$$ and maintenance in the long run.
 
I’m not suggesting this as anything I’d suggest you do, sort of a glimpse into how some of us in rural areas do things on our own houses. I’d call Martha’s son in law Skinny Pete who grades for the county and has a good size old road grader he uses on the farm and pay him to come over and scalp the top soil off and eyeball a flat cut in the hillside for the driveway 12” below finished grade. Experienced grader operators used to building and rebuilding ranch roads have a pretty good eye. Say $2,000 for the grader for the day, $1,000 to deliver it, $1,000 for two partial days for the operator. For crap muddy clay soil, haul in 12” of road base gravel to get it up off the native dirt to help keep it dry. 600’ X 12’ X 12” = 7,200 cubic feet divided by 27 makes 267 cubic yards. Road base varies a lot in price, but say it’s $50/yard delivered or $13,500. Enough 3/4 washed gravel to cover it all an inch is 22 yards at $150 a yard is another $3,500. Nobody I know is going to compact road base with anything other than grader tires. Grader operator will spread out the road base and the top skim layer of washed gravel on day two. What’s that come to? $21k for a basic rustic driveway. Maybe pay one of the nephews $1k to come over with his little garden tractor and smooth out any rough edges or dirt piles.

It can’t be understated that the cost of gravel varies a huge amount. We built a house with a similar length driveway for a client and crushed gravel wasn’t available at any price, but the local quarry had a 1” minus river run gravel - sort of smooth shaped, but dirt cheap. They didn’t have to process it, just scoop directly out of the ground and into the truck for $20/yard. Nobody in that area built anything with crushed or washed gravel.

It sounds simplistic, but I think the main value in a new driveway is the amount of road base hauled in. It can be reshaped, added to, topped with asphalt or whatever, but it is what everything is supported by. It’s designed to be load bearing and you could build a house on a pad of it. For that reason I’d question going with thinner amounts.
 
Steve300xcw said:
If I was paying $45k for a driveway, they sure as hell better not be putting down 1-1/4" rock as a base
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For sure. I imagine its different where you sre located. But our nearest quarry carries a 2-4in and a 3-5in. For a driveway with just cars and pickups we use the 2-4in and if trucks will be on it we use 3-5in
 
Thanks guys,
I have no descions in this. It's her and her dad. Personally, I think the whole thing is a bad idea all together. That is a story in itself. But I'm not footing the bill. I told her I'd help a "little" with the driveway. But my recommendations of waiting until spring are being overruled. She wants to start the drive ASAP. There is not even a building loan in place yet
I mentioned that all those big heavy trucks lumbering up and down the hill/driveway will tear it to shit. She says she will worry about that later.

I have a topo map I'll get posted.
 
I work for a geotechnical firm and no way would i do that project without having someone engineer it.

Spending 25-50k without engineering is taking a big risk. Especially w cutting the hillside.
 
This project is so far out of her league. And her dad, God love him, he is smart. But I think roadbuilding is out his mechanical engineer scope.
In a nutshell, property around her condo was bought up to put in welfare apts. I don't blame her as I would not want that kind as neighbors. But I think she jumped the gun buying this land. Her condo was in a desirable area. Close enough to Ohio U some hippy lib professor would have bought it or some rich parents could have bought it for their kids to live in while in school.

I tried to get her to consider following the power lines and coming up that way. She and her dad want the house on the other end. Hence where we are now.

I have a place to live so this is all on them, I'm just trying to help. Because she hasn't thought this out. the builder he's really good but he's 70 and wants to retire. He said he would build her place as he is a family friend. His last quote for a 2-bedroom house with basement was $450.000!! No septic price, they haven't checked to see what the power company is charging to run power to the place.
 
tony said:
This project is so far out of her league. And her dad, God love him, he is smart. But I think roadbuilding is out his mechanical engineer scope.
In a nutshell, property around her condo was bought up to put in welfare apts. I don't blame her as I would not want that kind as neighbors. But I think she jumped the gun buying this land. Her condo was in a desirable area. Close enough to Ohio U some hippy lib professor would have bought it or some rich parents could have bought it for their kids to live in while in school.

I tried to get her to consider following the power lines and coming up that way. She and her dad want the house on the other end. Hence where we are now.

I have a place to live so this is all on them, I'm just trying to help. Because she hasn't thought this out. the builder he's really good but he's 70 and wants to retire. He said he would build her place as he is a family friend. His last quote for a 2-bedroom house with basement was $450.000!! No septic price, they haven't checked to see what the power company is charging to run power to the place.
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Seems like a pretty common situation these days, people with no idea what they're doing have to try and figure it out the hard way. You generally can't tell people anything in these situations.

That being said, what I would do is drive around and see if I could find a bigger contractor building something in the area that's had similar site work done to what needs to be done here. At that point I'd ask or snoop out who did the work (assuming it looks like they did a decent job) and see what kind of number they throw at it.
Contractors generally have the cheapest local subs located, especially in the site work game, and site work is a very location specific knowledge based game, anyone turning a volume of it for a contractor will know the options for getting material and what works and what doesn't in the area, broadly speaking.

Being in a hurry to ram something through will generally turn off some contractors and anyone competent will have some kind of backlog of work. If a site work guy has time to jump on a project like that immediately, that can be a red flag. Finding the right guy and having some patience will pay dividends.
 
If you don’t have a building plan in place and it’s as far out as you say, I would just rough grade it and dump quarry spalls for now. Finish the driveway after the house is done.
 
I am a general contractor but I am not even going to try to guess at what to do here, because I live in a totally different area so what I would do is call a couple reputable med/larger excavating companies to come look at it and walk you through what they would do. Let each one of them tell you what they would do, more than likely your going to have a common denominator on material and amount of dirt work needed. You don’t have to use them but that will tell you what you need.

I am not saying a guy with a skid steer can’t do it but it sounds like he is just subcontracting everything out so your better off to look at people that can do it all in house.
 
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