Howdy,
The area that I need to make into driveway and parking lot does indeed get
reasonably wet at times... Its currently lawn, and in the spring it gets
wet enough that the tractor will leave ruts, a pickup can get stuck,
walking on it gets your shoes wet & the lawn feels spongy, etc.
Is Mirafi appropriate for this kinda thing, or will just putting in 8" or
so total of a larger rock base with smaller rocks on top be enough to firm
stuff up?
Any idea as to the square foot / yard cost of Mirafi? I've probably got
250' of driveway that I'd like to widen by 4' (existing driveway is
asphalt, but the 'shoulder' section I'd like to put in would be gravel),
plus about 6000 square feet of parking area. The fabric sounds like a
great idea, but cost is definately a driver here...
So far, my process seems to be:
1) strip sod using a rented gas powered sod stripper Dunno what I'll do
with this...
2) rototill remaining soil to a depth of 8" or so.
3) scrape or dirt scoop away to a depth of 8" or so (put this soil in
backyard over the leach field that was put in last fall... Its already
got soil over it, but we never smoothed it out, so now its a nightmare of
bumps/ruts/some grass/etc. This time, we can put the soil there and
landscape rake it down smooth, then seed).
4) (maybe) lay down fabric barrier 5) put down a layer (5"?)of bigger
unwashed rock/limestone/whatever is cheaper locally.
5) lay down a final layer of 3" or so smaller unwashed rock.
Does that seem reasonable?
Thanks!
Mark
On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Bill Rabel wrote:
> If you have any muddy spots on your road, put down a layer of Mirafi
> fabric. This stuff looks like black visqueen, but it is porous. It will
> let the water through, but it will prevent the mud coming up through
> your rock layer, or (worse yet) the rock disappearing into the muck.
> Mirafi is a brand name, but it is a generic description of this barrier
> material that your building-supply store should know about.
>
> We once put Mirafi over an entire two-acre site, because the soils
> engineer told us that the in-place cost of a layer of Mirafi would be
> about 20 percent the cost of an additional six-inches of fill in the
> high traffic areas. Since the entire lot was exposed to heavy loads, we
> covered the entire site. We simply laid Mirafi ahead of the fill,
> starting at the street.
>
> The bogs on the site, one of which nearly swallowed a tractor-trailer
> rig, were never a problem again. I'm sold on the stuff. I wish I had
> known about it years before, because one of our sites has asphalt that
> is about 18" deep in one spot where there was moisture.
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