DIY Crushed Concrete Driveway - A Cheaper Alternative.

by Lee @ Lady Lee's Home

We finished the first part of the driveway on the farm yesterday.
We choose to make a crushed concrete driveway because it’s much much cheaper than what we would have paid for the common gravel driveway.

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Our search for a cheaper way to pave a driveway started right after we spent more than a $1000 for 50ft of the conventional gravel driveway. One of the reasons we bought our land was because it’s off of a main country road that connects two small towns. We were thinking about building a farm stand in the future, so we can sell produce right from the farm. But we never intended to live close to the road. Our land is rectangular and hilly, so we can go as far back as we would like to and not hear or see the road. Or so we thought…

When we set out to build a driveway (there wasn’t any access road to the land), we were shocked to find out how expensive it is to pave what we thought was a ‘simple’ gravel driveway.

We spent over a $1000 for 50 ft of a driveway! At this point, we knew that if we want to build our house 2000 or 3000 ft from the road, we will have to come up with a serious amount of money.

So the search for a cheaper alternative began. And since then, we became very familiar with the world of driveways and even ended up building affordable driveways for others in the area on the side.

From my previous driveway post, you know that, at first, we were looking for dump truck drivers who pick up milled asphalt from paving jobs around the city to dump the material at our place. This was easy when we redid the driveway at our house in town, it proved to be much harder to find a willing driver to dump on our land since it’s deep in the country. Not so close to job sites anymore.

We started searching and found out that there are a few places around town who recycle materials and resell them to the public. Paving companies will bring their waste — large blocks of concrete or asphalt — to those yards, the crusher will crush and mill the big blocks, and resell it as paving or filling material.

We learned that prices change all the time. A crusher can sell asphalt for $12 a ton one week and $9 the next because there might have been a large paving job around town, and they are now dealing with a huge amount of material that they need to get rid of. Some concrete plants might even give you their waste for free when they clean the plant.

So when the price went down to $6 a ton for crushed concrete (compared at $18 a ton for gravel) we bought 100 tons.

Head over to Lady Lee's Home to see how we build this driveway...