The Driveway - Redi-Rock

Let me tell you that the driveway has been a high maintenance drama queen on this project. We have gone out of our way to accommodate it since day one. The driveway was a huge factor on where we placed our house on the property, because we wanted access to the main road and we didn't want a long driveway snaking down through the property (which would be a nightmare to clear in the winter).

Remember this picture? Tyler was standing at the edge of our garage, with the future driveway behind him. Notice how we have a lot of dirt to add in order to fill in the driveway. Yet, as you can see, our concrete retaining wall kind of just ends, which means any dirt we added would fall down the hill.

As a solution, we needed to extend that retaining wall. Thus, Redi-rocks! Redi-rocks are these silly concrete blocks that go together like Legos to form retaining walls. They aren't the prettiest thing we had ever seen, but honestly, they were the only solution presented to us. Standard Redi-rock comes with an aged pattern to it, which makes it very distinguishable to anyone looking to identify it.


We have become experts in redi-rock identification. Just look what happened when we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week in New York. At the Temple of Dendur, what did I spy in the corner of the installation, but Redi-rock. Yes, folks this is the only picture I have of the temple, and it's of me pointing out the fake rocks. Talk about geek.


So we convinced the Redi-rock people in Spokane to cast our blocks without the crumbled aged front that makes the walls look like they were put in place around the time that Lewis and Clark were walking through. We figured smooth fronts would go a bit better with our house design.

A few weeks later, they arrived.

As you can imagine, they are extremely heavy and had to be delicately moved one at a time.


Site work began by adding dirt and smoothing out a work space for the equipment.



and Voila! After two weeks of work (during which I never actually got photos of the installation), the rocks were put into place and formed a retaining wall. Dirt was added and now we have a driveway!






If you haven't been on site yet, I have stepped in to give you a bit of perspective. Here I am standing at the edge of the new driveway (wearing hiking boots which I always wear on the jobsite because it's so dirty, thank you very much).

...and here I am at the same point, from the lower portion of our property. This should clarify two things for you: (1) yes, our property is steep, and (2) that is one massive concrete wall. Sure, it feels like a bit of an afterthought, and it's definitely not one of my favorite things about the property, and sure, we'll probably try to cover it in trees over the years, but, let me remind you that we HAVE a driveway!

We also had a smaller rock wall installed alongside the opposite side of the house so we can park our imaginary wooden boat or wasabi-colored Carmenghia next to the garage.

Now, what are we going to do with all of these rocks?