initially we only had one single, straight and also super steep road up to the top of the hill, the spot with the great view. steep enough so 2wd cars had a hard time getting to the top. then we located and eventually upgraded a perviously hardly visible goat track that we found sneaking off to the left and winding around the hill.
we did that because we needed a second, and less steep way up to satisfy fire truck access requirements. initially we let the new road end just below the top of the hill; at the time we had no idea where the house would end up standing and where we’d want the road to go.
now, however, we know precisely where the building is, and we also decided to keep the road well away from the house: we prefer vegetation around the house, not the dust from the road.
so now the bypass has been constructed, and to avoid trucks trying to drive up and get dangerousely close to our house (that really happened a few times), it was time to de-construct the old road leading up. we were able to source some top soil, so i spent a quality day on the excavator, scraping the gravel off the now superfluous track before the new soil was carted in.
of course we re-used the gravel i recovered: it is now used for the guest parking spot. the spot is easily accessible, and framed by our home-grown granite boulders. obviously.
and this is where we applied the top soil. we will definitely need more, a lot more, if we want to have a bit of grass and some nice shrubs around the house. we are not allowed much vegetation in the fire management zone: grass needs to be shorter than 100 mm and we can only have a few isolated bushes, but we’ll figure something out.
not bad for two days’ work.