Gravel Parking Area

[Dunacn]

Bought our place about a year ago. We have about 700' of gravel drive and maybe about 5,000sf of gravel parking between the house and barn. From the looks of it, neither has been maintained in years, maybe decades. This past winter, the parking area was mostly mud. My question is, if I want to put down geotextile fabric first, what would be the best way to prep the area. I was thinking of taking the box blade w/ scarifiers and trying to scrape a couple of inches into the base before laying fabric and then covering with A2 aggregate. Thoughts.

 

[texas42]

I suggest you level up your parking area with the box blade, being careful to not leave low spots that could pond water. You want it to slope one or two directions if at all possible. Then install your geo-fabric with proper overlay and soil pins, nails to hold it in place. Then dump and spread your topping being careful not to disturb the geo-fabric. If you have a method of compacting the smoothed up area before installing the fabric, that would help also.

 

[Cord]

If it turns to mud in spring, then there is probably no base under the gravel. Start the repair by salvaging what clean stone you can and ditch the rest. Dig out all the black dirt down to a good base. Around here that will be gravel which can be a couple of feet down. Back fill using compacted non-organic material if it's deep or a coarse stone. My local quarry sells "basic fill" for $2/ton. The stuff is a mix of silt and sand from the wash plant. It's cheap, but really needs to be compacted well or it'll settle. Otherwise, use breaker run for the deep holes. I like a 6-8" base of 3" TB topped with 4" of 1.25" TB. If you used a geotextile, it would go under the 3" TB to keep it from pressing into the base material. Build your drive like this and even fully loaded dump trucks won't leave ruts in spring.

 

[Ed of all trades]

If it turns to mud in spring, then there is probably no base under the gravel. Start the repair by salvaging what clean stone you can and ditch the rest. Dig out all the black dirt down to a good base. Around here that will be gravel which can be a couple of feet down. Back fill using compacted non-organic material if it's deep or a coarse stone. My local quarry sells "basic fill" for $2/ton. The stuff is a mix of silt and sand from the wash plant. It's cheap, but really needs to be compacted well or it'll settle. Otherwise, use breaker run for the deep holes. I like a 6-8" base of 3" TB topped with 4" of 1.25" TB. If you used a geotextile, it would go under the 3" TB to keep it from pressing into the base material. Build your drive like this and even fully loaded dump trucks won't leave ruts in spring.

I did about 20 yards of my 100 yard long drive way like that and it is the worst part of the drive and has had the most stone put on it. The rest I just had the truck spread right on top of the grass and have had to do little to it. That 20 yards still gives me fits and it has been 10 yrs and it has had a full extra load of stone spread on it. Does not always work as you say. Ed

 

[Cord]

There must be something else happening on your drive (such as water flowing towards or under the drive). The recipe that I posted is would be a light duty road base design. Roads are never built directly on dirt because they simply wouldn't hold up. I built the drives at my property like this and the fines never even get soft in spring time. Best gravel drive I've ever had.

 

[oosik]

Fortunately, all the parking area around my house & out buildings is field grass. I mow it like a lawn and after 30+ years - it pretty much looks like lawn. However, there is a 100 foot section in my mile long gravel driveway that has been a problem since day one. I think God put it there to challenge my patience and humble me. I've done about everything I can but in the spring this area will get soft and muddy. I gave up pouring gravel, digging out, etc, etc and have learned that before it turns to concrete, each summer, I regrade with my LPGS and live with it.

I've only seen geo-fabric used by the county highway dept, in our area. I think it has to do with the cost. My driveway was one of the very few in the area where the contractor actually removed the topsoil and came back up to grade with selected material. Most just pour gravel on the dirt and go with that.

 

[RedNeckRacin]

Pouring gravel on topsoil or grass is a fools errand. You have to give the stone a foundation or it won't support anything. We have clay right below a couple inches of topsoil. There is rarely stone within 10 feet of the natural surface. What geotextile does is give your stone a base so you can use less stone. It effectively gives the stone more of a foot print Nad keeps fines from migrating up into the stone. If your axle load at the surface doesn't get spread out enough by the stone below then the next layer of material can't support it and you get ruts.

Water is the enemy when road building. Keep the water out of the stone or drain it away as soon as possible.

 

[oosik]

RedNeckRacin - Geez, don't tell that to the geologist & highway engineers that designed and over saw the building of the Alaska Haul Road to the oil fields on the North Slope. Their initial attempts to remove the overburden and then bring in classified material were disastrous. The solution was to place the classified material directly on top of the peat & permafrost. Granted it required a lot of material but properly constructed such a road will last.

 

[GLyford]

I have fallen in the trap before of assuming that soils someone is talking about where they are behave at all like anything I am used to. A draining soil with a clay topsoil is different from New England ledge and boulders with barely any topsoil, is different from Georgia or Texas red clay, is different from river valley blue silt clay, is different from coastal sand flats. Sometimes the best thing you can do is ignore the conventional wisdom and do what the neighbors have already shown works...but it doesn't hurt to ask why now and then, too.

Perhaps there is no bottom to the clay, it never drains, and if you want the water flow away from your roadway you actually need to build up more clay as a water barrier, rather than dig down as a place all the water will drain to. Maybe there is no rock worth buying in economical trucking distance. Maybe there is so much well draining rock just below the surface you only need to get the leaf litter out of the way. Sometimes a floating roadway is better than a well supported one. Sometimes one good ditch and culvert will do more than any amount of rock.

Is there frost? How deep? Is the property dead flat with nowhere for the water to go? Or is it sloping and well drained, except when the ground is frozen and snowbanks act like a dam? My lot is sand at least a yard deep, but I can still have standing water come spring if the snowpack, frozen ground, and snowbanks act just right...sometimes an afternoon chipping a drain channel will fix it, sometimes it won't.

So to me, it can vary so much with the local conditions that I would want to know more from OP, what their local soils are like, what the slope and groundwater of their lot is like, or what part of what state they are in. Then between the bunch of us on here, we might be able to zero in on it a little.

 

[RedNeckRacin]

RedNeckRacin - Geez, don't tell that to the geologist & highway engineers that designed and over saw the building of the Alaska Haul Road to the oil fields on the North Slope. Their initial attempts to remove the overburden and then bring in classified material were disastrous. The solution was to place the classified material directly on top of the peat & permafrost. Granted it required a lot of material but properly constructed such a road will last.

I think permafrost is its own unique animal and has to be treated as such. That was a very impressive feat and I give those guys full credit.

Building a "floating" road is nonsense. The weight of the traffic must be carried to the earth/bedrock. Those layers of soils have different weight bearing capacities and angles at which that load is distributed through the profile. This is all affected but the pore pressure of the water changing with varying moisture levels. So constructing a surface that is going to have minimal movement has to transfer that wheel load in some fashion by distributing that higher psi load at the surface and spread the load out to the lower psi that the subsonic can support. Pretty simple. This can be accomplished with varying depths of rock, competent soil, or engineered geotextiles. But go ahead and "float" your road Glyford....

 

[farm boy00]

I think permafrost is its own unique animal and has to be treated as such. That was a very impressive feat and I give those guys full credit.

Building a "floating" road is nonsense. The weight of the traffic must be carried to the earth/bedrock. Those layers of soils have different weight bearing capacities and angles at which that load is distributed through the profile. This is all affected but the pore pressure of the water changing with varying moisture levels. So constructing a surface that is going to have minimal movement has to transfer that wheel load in some fashion by distributing that higher psi load at the surface and spread the load out to the lower psi that the subsonic can support. Pretty simple. This can be accomplished with varying depths of rock, competent soil, or engineered geotextiles. But go ahead and "float" your road Glyford....

Hey what works works. Logic ain't always right. Like with a old Bible story. Noah and the whale. Where logically a whale can't swallow a human but God let the whale swallow Noah. There is no logic. It just works

 

[GLyford]

Earth or bedrock isn't always attainable. Ask the guys building corduroy roads over peat bogs and such.

I'm not saying what you propose isn't right most of the time...but what I am saying is that there are times when it isn't, and the guy who started the conversation hasn't been back to actually tell us what he has.

Sort of of like someone asking what to replace on his truck if it sounds kind of funny. Without more information, we're just throwing spitballs.

 

[paulharvey]

Earth or bedrock isn't always attainable. Ask the guys building corduroy roads over peat bogs and such.

I'm not saying what you propose isn't right most of the time...but what I am saying is that there are times when it isn't, and the guy who started the conversation hasn't been back to actually tell us what he has.

Sort of of like someone asking what to replace on his truck if it sounds kind of funny. Without more information, we're just throwing spitballs.

The standard in Florida, for fairly major roads is 10" limerock, 12" of stabilized subgrade (they add 4" of rock and run a mixer 12" deep, mixing the 4" of rock with either native soils or clean fill) and the 24" below that unsuitable materials (organics, or fat clays) are removed and replaced with clean fill. Obviously we have 3"-4.5" of asphalt on top (1.5" of many county/city roads), but the key is compaction, and getting the unsuitables out of it. In most of the areas we don't have much of what you would call "top soil", but we do clip the grass/sod/maybe top few inches off.

 

[Industrial Toys]

A curduroy road certainly is a floating road and apparently works quite well. I have a thousand foot driveway that is built on organic material. That's not the way I would have liked it, but it's what I inherited. The odd truck loads of gravel over the years served quite well and with the exception of when the frost comes out of the ground, the driveway is serviceable.

 

[MESSMAKER]

Sometimes some larger stone will help you get a better base. Creek rock or stone about as big as a tennis ball followed by some #6. Pack that down and then wait a while and pack it again. Make sure you have some slope and that might be all you need. I really like dense grade or #9s for a top coat, but that does not hold up well to running water.

 

[Ed of all trades]

Pouring gravel on topsoil or grass is a fools errand. You have to give the stone a foundation or it won't support anything. We have clay right below a couple inches of topsoil. There is rarely stone within 10 feet of the natural surface. What geotextile does is give your stone a base so you can use less stone. It effectively gives the stone more of a foot print Nad keeps fines from migrating up into the stone. If your axle load at the surface doesn't get spread out enough by the stone below then the next layer of material can't support it and you get ruts.

Water is the enemy when road building. Keep the water out of the stone or drain it away as soon as possible.

I have a good road where I did not dig and where I did I don't. Set answers are easy but not always true. Say what you will but I know better. Ed
By the way I have said nothing about anyone being a fool. Ed

 

[RedNeckRacin]

I have a good road where I did not dig and where I did I don't. Set answers are easy but not always true. Say what you will but I know better. Ed
By the way I have said nothing about anyone being a fool. Ed

I obviously don't know your local conditions nor did I watch how your road was installed but I can tell you that you have to have a proper road constructed to be a able to transfer the load from a truck tire down to a reasonable psi that the subgrade can support. This is not my opinion, it's an engineering faCT that cannot be reasoned away. Tire loads can approach 800lbs/inch for a semi. I realize that we are not building a highway with a crazy number of esal's but the principal is the same. We use rock, pavement, or concrete to take the higher loads and spread them over a larger area to transfer to the next layer of support which also happens to be cheaper or spreads this loading out more. This is all in attempt to get the insitu material at some point to carry this loading without deforming. Depending on the area and what soils are present this can take very little effort and luck for some people or it can take some very complex systems to accomplish this simple task.

 

[RedNeckRacin]

Hey what works works. Logic ain't always right. Like with a old Bible story. Noah and the whale. Where logically a whale can't swallow a human but God let the whale swallow Noah. There is no logic. It just works

Pretty sure there are whales that are large enough to swallow a human. There is a logical reason of how a force is resisted. They have engineers figure this stuff out every day. It is certainly not a miracle. Otherwise, how do we build these highways all over the country. Civil engineers know what they are doing.

 

[cat fever]

Hey what works works. Logic ain't always right. Like with a old Bible story. Noah and the whale. Where logically a whale can't swallow a human but God let the whale swallow Noah. There is no logic. It just works

OK I'm no expert on the Bible, but memory tells me it was Jonah and the whale not Noah. Noah might have seen some whales after he built the ark and it started to float.

As far as the topic; I'd go with Redneckracin's plan because it sounds like he knows what he's talking about.:thumbsup:

 

[LD1]

I'd start by digging up an area to see what he actually has.

Around here, we don't do driveways like roads. We don't need a 4' thick gravel base to drive on.

We spread what we call 1's and 2's limestone about 4" thick. Those are maybe 2"-5" diameter. Fist sized to softball sized.

Then top that with 304's. Which is also called 1.5" minus. Which is anything and everything that will fit through a 1.5" screen. So it has a lot of fines and dust to lock the base stone in. That stuff packs like concrete and alot just quit there. If you want a top coat, a few inches of 8's which are pea sized, or a few inches of 57's which are 3/4". (Large marble size).

If the op has a decent base but just organics on top, scrape that off and go with the 304's. Sometimes called crusher run.