An '09 Project Postponed

Today's theme question: What is a second home, if not a place to invest what time and money you have in a second set of perplexing home ownership problems when you already have them taken care of in the primary residence?

When we first started coming to the Hawksbill Cabin, a new house had been built in a neighboring lot. As a part of those activities, a new driveway was built, facilitating increased use of an access road that is platted but was never built between several of the lots uphill from us. The construction crews needed the access, but the whole situation caused a lot of tension up there.

Eventually we noticed that the road use had redirected some rain flow to our driveway, and there were gullies forming. The builder came along with a bulldozer and regraded our drive and parking area, and put in some leftover gravel which sufficed for a few months, until summer rains in 2008 restarted the erosion.

That situation has continued, and given our desire to resolve other projects with the house and properties, we haven't focused on the driveway problem until now. In October, we started planning a project for regrading the area, adding in new, larger gravel, and attempting to redirect the water flow to other areas to slow it down and keep it off of the driveway.

We are working with Mickey on this project, and the work was supposed to be done earlier this month. The weather hasn't cooperated, and now we are probably looking at spring for completion. He'll use some leftover railroad ties to create a berm that will send the water into an area with undergrowth and saplings, where we hope it will filter and dissipate rather than trucking on down the drive, full of sediment, into Beaver Run - that's where the water lives, after all.