Concrete!

I am not a fan of gravel, either for walking or for driving.  I am definitely not a fan of using deep gravel for bringing a surface up to grade, rather than bringing in dirt and compacting it.  At the house we have massive area of driveway/parking space that is gravel-covered.  Whoever did snow removal last year didn't help the situation, scraping a lot of gravel into piles along with the snow. 

As a result of the gravel having been pushed away by snow plowing activities, it was quite a drop out of the shop and the garage.  For the garage, we had a special blend compacted in front of the skirt for a ramp.  For the shop, I decided to have a skirt poured.  I wouldn't mind having the entire thing paved, but I haven't priced that out, and suspect that it will be pretty costly.

We also had a walkway leading to the front door that was gravel.  The snow removal service managed to remove a lot of the gravel from the walkway and bury my grass.  It took several hours of work to get the gravel raked up and the grass uncovered.  Here is a Before photo of the front walkway, complete with show-shovel scoops of gravel on the grass:

Walkway Before (after photo coming soon!)

 Shop entryway before

Shop entryway after

While the excavator was at the house, we also had him change the grade on some of the soil so that it slopes away from the house, and had him bury some unsightly concrete things that the previous owner had left behind.  His assistant was interested in the automotive junk that was next to the shop:  A pickup bed full of broken parts, a transmission, a couple of bumpers, tarps, etc.  I told him that he could have it all.  It's kinda nice to have it gone and looking like a clean driveway rather than a junk-yard.