Driveway Puddling

When we first moved in, I thought the way water puddled on the driveway was just a nuisance. Any time it rained, the driveway would fill up, and a few hours later it would be gone again. This winter has brought some additional frustration though. In the last few weeks, I've really begun to realize the problem that this is.




From the road, the driveway slopes down toward the garage. Just before the garage, it slopes up again steeply, creating a big cup that holds water with nowhere to drain. This puddle can be 12" deep in some spots. It often freezes over and makes a big mess. When it's not frozen, it leaves no way to get in or out of the house in the front. One of the deepest pockets is in the walkway from the driveway to the door. 

To further complicate things, the catchment area of this puddle isn't just the driveway itself, nor the roof of the garage that drains directly onto the driveway (no gutters), but the collection area extends out to the road, and all the way to the crown of the connecting state highway. We live in a rural area with no storm drains. The town's official storm water policy is to let the town's natural waterways take all of the surface runoff. A few hundred feet downslope on the road, there is an outlet to the brook. The problem is that all that water runs into the driveway instead of passing it by and going out into the brook. The driveway also has no lip on it, and being lower than the roadway, all the water flows into our driveway. 

 This is the driveway after I've shoveled the water off. It gets mostly dry, but on warm melting days like today, it will be filled up again in an hour.

Here's  a short video of me removing water from the driveway with a snow shovel. I've found this to be the most successful method of getting rid of the water.



We're hoping to be able to fix the driveway at some point sooner rather than later. The neighbors say the driveway's been this way for 30 years. At some point, the driveway definitely shifted, settled, or sunk because it's cracked all over. It'd be nice if the water drained out TO the street, rather than in from the street. Off the side of the garage, where a lot of the water drains (usually via wicking where the water level reaches the grass on the side) the ground is VERY wet almost all of the time. I bet fixing the driveway will result in that area drying out a bit, too.

Updates and Observations

It rained HARD today.  It was the first time it rained in weeks.  The sky was really ominous for a bit, and we saw over two dozen birds of prey of some sort circling around too high up for us to identify them.  We put out every water-holding vessel we had and hoped for the best.  Our collection exceeded our expectations!  It only took about a half hour to fill all our tubs and trash cans.

Our only source of outside water has been straight from the brook.  That's not really a problem, but it's not convenient.  It requires walking all the way down to "the point," squatting down, and filling the buckets with silty water, and occasionally, minnows.  I only seem to be able to get the buckets half full because the water's been so low.  It's also been hell trying to get anything to regrow where they dug the yard out to put the new septic tank in.  The clover and buckwheat I put down shouldn't have any trouble germinating now.  I'd really like to have more than just grass. 

We're making progress on putting in the permanent chicken run.  I want to move the coops and the tractors out of the way temporarily while we finish.  I can't wait to be able to get those birds into the tractors and move them around.  It's amazing how much grass (clover etc etc) they've eaten, trampled, and matted down.

I figured out where and how the seepage in the basement happens.  It runs off the little roof of the hatch door, dribbles down and leaks between where the block and the stone foundation meet.  This can be easily fixed with some catchment, well placed plants, and a little back-filling.  Also, I couldn't believe the amount of water that pooled up off the left side of the front door.  Definitely need to do something there.  The driveway also totally filled up to an incredible level, cascaded over the side yard, around the back of the garage, and into the wetland soil, totally recharging the water level in the wetland area.  Where the brook and the little stream meet up (the point,)  the water level was all the way up to the grass.  I got soaked every time I walked out the back door from the sheet of water coming off the roof.  The carpet in the breezeway seemed to stay dry, so I'm still not sure why it has water stains.  Also, the chickens seemed to be happy with their tarps covering their runs, because they were all outside during the storm and weren't miserably huddled up like the used to do.

In the end, everything was back to normal.  The brook is filled up again, and gurgling away happily outside.  And a tiny bit of sun even peeked back out around the clouds.

Adjusting to Life at New House

A week has passed since we moved into New House, and we're adjusting (me slowly, Naomi is probably fine) to life here.  Some things are drastically different, some things are drastically more awesome, and some things are going to take time to adjust to (for me since I'm apparently bad at change according to Naomi).

I'm gonna start off with some of the bad things so I can move on from them into the awesome.  For starters, my commute is an hour long, but at least I've traded the rat race on the interstate for a pleasant bob along a two-lane road through beautiful country, at least until I have to cross the river.  For the first week, we didn't have any internet access (not really a big deal on its own) but the part that sucks about it is that I'm in a totally new place in a region where I've never lived before, and I don't know where absolutely anything is.  I learned really quickly where Home Depot is because I've been there every single day, sometimes twice.  Without internet access, I was very productive.  I can guarantee I wouldn't have gotten half the work done around the house had I been able to look at non-essential stuff for as long as I pleased.  I went to bed before 9:00 every night except the first one, when we went to a party.

We were also here for the first week without our chickens, and of course, Penelope too.  That was hard, because it didn't feel like home without our birds.  My dad graciously took care of them at our old place.  He even said he would miss them when they moved here!  I spent every waking moment that I wasn't at work preparing for their arrival by making new hoophouses that they could live in while I put in their more permanent fence.  On Friday, with the help of a friend (and his trailer!) we moved the coops here and set up the new hoop/tractors.  The birds seemed happy to be on nice fresh grass and have tons of bugs to eat.  Some downsides are that they're in the direct sun now, whereas they've always been under a canopy of oaks.  As a result, they've been hot.  We rigged up some high tech (lean something against the fence) shade panels for them today, and they liked that.  I improved the door on the little coop so it pulls up like the big coop, and attached the wire to the coops a little better than I had previously with staples.  On Saturday, with the help of our brother-in-law and his son, we took down the old run and brought it here to be reinstalled. 

old run's worth of wire

New people-sized gate posts

the Tweeters flopped out.  Notice Fabio in the front

the Big Birds, and the old gate! I'm thinking about adding it to the end of the tractor for easier access

The week before we moved here was spent putting in some 4x4 gate posts for the big-sized gate I'm going to put in.  No more tiny gate! Yay!  I'll have to bend at the neck slightly to walk through instead of crouching all the way down to go through the waist-high gate we used to have.  I can't wait to have everything permanently set up.  That will be awesome.  I have dreams of rain water collection with a gravity feed so I don't have to haul buckets every morning.

Our new little kingdom

The topic of hauling buckets leads me to my next point-  our well failed the potability test.  We had already been drinking only bottled water just until we found out, but we're stuck on it for a few more days.  We had been showering and washing our dishes in the well water anyway, just not drinking it.  This morning we shock chlorinated the water, and it has to sit for a bunch of hours.  I've been hauling water up to the house from the brook.  It seems I can never escape hauling water!  It makes me wish I had some buckets with plastic handles rather than just the metal wire one.  It'd be so much more comfortable.  Tomorrow I'll be bucket-bathing in brook water before work.  Hopefully the shock treatment will be enough, and things will be back to normal in another week.

I think I will miss our old floodplain place in that I don't have an endless source of drift gifts like we used to have.  All our buckets, trash cans, tubs, and wood came from occasional floods that would carry stuff downstream to us.  I guess the upside to that is that if I need something, buying whatever it is will give me a better quality, just not free.  Maybe I'll upgrade to some buckets with handles. 

On to the good-  I love this house!  I've been sleeping like a baby, thanks to the babbling brook directly outside our bedroom window and the cool air coming down off the hill in the evening.  Things are progressing slowly, mostly because I was preparing for the arrival of our birds, and that left Naomi stuck inside unpacking by herself.  I hope to make it a two-person effort this week and get the kitchen locked down and move on to the other rooms.  The ancient dishwasher didn't drain on its trial run, and then on every subsequent run, so I bought a new one.  It'll be coming this week, as well as a new washer, which we've never had.  I'm excited!!!

We got our little garden of tomatoes, peppers and strawberries started.  I started them all from seed about two months ago in preparation for spring planting, and once the house deal started coming together, we decided to hold off planting them.  Now, it's really late to be planting them, but at least its done!  That area of the yard gets great sun exposure, and I think they're going to take off.  I'm hoping to get some cucumbers in for Naomi this week, and maybe some beans.  That's probably all I'm going to try to plant here this year, so I can focus on the mountain of projects that need to get done, like rewiring the electrical outlets in the whole house. 

I forgot the rest of the tomato stakes back at the Big Garden

already- established blueberries doing their thing

So, things are coming together.  There is more to talk about, but those are the big things.  Now that we're back online, I hope to get back to more regular updates.  The Big Garden is taking off!  I picked a billion fava beans today, and lots of other stuff is going well over there, but I'll save that for a future post.