Now we are talking about the red headed stepchild.

The forgotten thing–

–the thing put off till later. 

You say to yourself as you do your drawings…

“–oh, it will be ok… I just want the house done.”

“–oh, we don’t need a driveway… we can do it later, don’t even include it in the bid…. we will do this after the house is built.”

–oh…. NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

For one, the bank will not close on your construction loan till it is done.

If it is not in the bid… “well it can be negotiated later…”

But since it is NOT in the construction loan, you have to pay cash for it (real money)

The only way to fold this back in, is to do a total refi after construction (which I did) but interest rates were good at the time.

PHYSICALLY… 

This is another time that SEE BEFORE YOU BUILD, is exquisitely important. How many of these driveways would have been reconfigured, realigned, if they saw how GOOFY (link) it would make their whole property!

So, you spend BILLIONS on a great house, and put the driveway (and landscaping) off to do later… (a real JV move!) link to dictionary…. 

Later in this case does come faster than you think, AND exactly when you are totally sick of construction, and want everyone out of your life, your hair, your bathroom! 

If you look up “standard” sizes of turn arounds, it will be quite large…. if your plot is small you can still squeak it in…IFFFF you prove it with drawings.

My experience.

I needed retaining walls on each side… and to build them, they had to have about 2 or 3 feet of structure on both side or each wall, for wooden forms to pour cement into ….. quickly, the width of our driveway got smaller and smaller. 

Now, 90% of cars can go down this hill…but not a huge Presidential Escalade, might not fit down here, an Escalade… but… this is the compromise of design …not because we are cheap…but of necessity…which is forgivable. (And future homeowners can “fix this” by demolishing the wall and doing it their way…. everything is fixable… with enough time and money…or they just get a standard size car!

In Retrospect, we shoot down the driveway happily… watch the mirror on one side, and the other is OK. But the bonus, is the walls of roses and gardenias on each side as we ascend up to street leave… it is just lavish… all on 2 feet of earth, on the back side of each wall.

(duplicate THIS TO LANDSAPING…)

WATCH LIKE.A hawk…. do not let any scrap wood be buried on your land… a decade later, you will have yard collapses, and termite nests here… this is a horrible shortcut contractors do to save dump runs…  we have heard of whole neighborhoods with collapsed driveways by this being a routine procedure… That ended up costing #30K too $50K to fix.