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....