A Boring Post About The Driveway...

Our driveway needs to be replaced but it's ridiculously expensive. I skipped sealing last year due to life and this year we paid the price, it was basically falling apart into bits of gravel. It was as bad as the year we bought it, I vividly remember how horrible the grit and rocks were. All summer the kids have hated walking on it with bare feet. The grit easily tracked into the pool. It's been a mess. 

I'm hoping these efforts will do the same as the year we bought it... two coats of the good sealant and it was MUCH better. We've put off a new driveway for a full 12 years before it got this bad again. In hopes of buying even more time on the driveway, I didn't cut any corners. I sealed edge to edge, including digging out the grass and dirt that's eroded onto it. It's a huge pain to prep the driveway this much, but has been worth it... In the front half of the driveway (gate to street), we gained 6-12" of driveway back doing this - next door our neighbors had professional landscapers come do their mulch the past two years and the generous layers of mulch inched over in the rain. I thought our driveway felt a little narrower, but I also suspected I might be crazy. Turns out it WAS a full foot narrower where I park my car! 

To get this project done when we were in the middle of sports and back to school, I broke it up into pieces over a stretch of beautiful days that were PERFECT for sealing a driveway but our schedule was insane. Work, sports, doctor appointments, back to school night... insanity. But getting this done was critical and the weather was too good not to try. I only had a few hours here and there, and even then I had to really work hard to squeeze the time in. It was exhausting! On day 1, I cleared and cleaned the first half of the driveway. Day 2 I sealed the front half, then I cleaned most of the backyard part of the driveway (it got too dark, the days are getting shorter so much earlier!). Day 3 I finished cleaning the back, then tried to seal the whole back... and ran out of sealant because the driveway was so pitted. Mike went out to get more that night, so day 4 I was able to squeeze in the last backyard section between soccer and more soccer and even a second coat on the front half. On the final day I did a second coat over the entire back half.

WORTH IT.

It looks a lot better. It feels a lot better. Hopefully it holds up well too. And I'll be sure to do another round next summer/fall so that it doesn't fall apart again so soon. 

Spread out over 5 days definitely made it feel endless... but in reality it wasn't that bad because it would have taken me 3 days even if I worked straight through (a day for cleaning the driveway and then allowing 24 hours between coats drying time). And doing it this way in smaller pieces, just like I tackle most things these days, makes it possible to somehow get everything done even when the schedule insanity is dialed up to 11. And I feel a lot better knowing it's done.