Temporary drive fix

[ListWriter]

Our new house has a very skinny drive. I can't get in or out of the car without standing in the flowerbeds. We really want to widen the drive but it would be temporary - it's right where our new extension is going to be (when we have saved enough money in a couple of years).

The current drive is a hotpotch of gravel (which I'm not keen on), concrete and council slabs. So anything we add will be part of the hotpotch really.

We've had a couple of quotes which have come in at over £1000 for either concrete or slabs.

I'm just wondering if there's a way of making it cheaper... Gravel would probably do it but it's so messy.

I was thinking of putting the soil that we dig out on freecycle or ebay...? And getting maybe a cheap labourer in to do the digging.

Has anyone tried anything similar?

what is your subsoil?
just that ours is dense gravel so we took the turf off, drove the car up and down a few times and its harder than concrete.

we recently put down cotswold chipping onto an area of 4 x 5m (so I presume much bigger than the area you are doing).

Dh dug out the topsoil which filled a skip (you maybe able to get away with a hippo bag)

we need 4 tonnes of hardcore and a tonne of chippings....I may have imagined these figures Anyway it came to £500 including brick edging.

looks really good and very easy for a diyer to do.

You can get a kind of strong, rubbery mesh stuff that keeps gravel in one place so it's less messy. I've seen it advertised under several names, but if you google 'gravel retaining grid' and 'ground reinforcement' you'll get an idea. It provides strength, too, to stop the gravel getting all churned up.

Ladybird, how did you compound the hardcore?

We've got one of those Square pounder things

we were going to hire a machine but didn't need to in the end.

Oh we also needed a membrane

Ooooh responses, thanks guys.

I don't know what our subsoil is - I shall have to have a dig down.

Our area is quite big - 9m by 1.5m. We're hoping to get 2 cars in, one behind the other. Mine has the skinny drive but the other is parked in a muddy puddle across the road. I am liking the sound of the gravel retaining stuff. That sounds like it could be our answer.

Potentially dim question but what's a square pounder?

www.hss.com/g/47428/Vibrating-Plate-Wacker-Plate.html

Ooooh... I see.

square pounder wasn't the technical term, more the I'll watch out the window while dh does the work term!

We've got one at our house at the moment that the builders are using...they called it a 'whomper' which I think is the best term for a piece of building equipment ever.

I did my garden path with a handheld version. I am masochistic like that. Once I'd got over hitting my own feet with it, it was OK. Over a summer, it did give me decent biceps for the first time ever, which I have sadly lost since.

Struggling, if you're looking for a way to get those biceps back... I can help with that

we have just dug up the flower bed/lawn in the middle of our drive and usefully used the soil/rubble to fill in a pond. so far it is withstanding rain and cars and what not. one day we will pretty it but for now we just need to be able to use it. was a bit of graft from dh and fil (love pregnancy) but freeeeeee!