Gravel driveway help

[Silveroddo]

This project is so far out of her league. And her dad, God love him, he is smart. But I think roadbuilding is out his mechanical engineer scope.
In a nutshell, property around her condo was bought up to put in welfare apts. I don't blame her as I would not want that kind as neighbors. But I think she jumped the gun buying this land. Her condo was in a desirable area. Close enough to Ohio U some hippy lib professor would have bought it or some rich parents could have bought it for their kids to live in while in school.

I tried to get her to consider following the power lines and coming up that way. She and her dad want the house on the other end. Hence where we are now.

I have a place to live so this is all on them, I'm just trying to help. Because she hasn't thought this out. the builder he's really good but he's 70 and wants to retire. He said he would build her place as he is a family friend. His last quote for a 2-bedroom house with basement was $450.000!! No septic price, they haven't checked to see what the power company is charging to run power to the place.

Seems like a pretty common situation these days, people with no idea what they're doing have to try and figure it out the hard way. You generally can't tell people anything in these situations.

That being said, what I would do is drive around and see if I could find a bigger contractor building something in the area that's had similar site work done to what needs to be done here. At that point I'd ask or snoop out who did the work (assuming it looks like they did a decent job) and see what kind of number they throw at it.
Contractors generally have the cheapest local subs located, especially in the site work game, and site work is a very location specific knowledge based game, anyone turning a volume of it for a contractor will know the options for getting material and what works and what doesn't in the area, broadly speaking.

Being in a hurry to ram something through will generally turn off some contractors and anyone competent will have some kind of backlog of work. If a site work guy has time to jump on a project like that immediately, that can be a red flag. Finding the right guy and having some patience will pay dividends.

 

[Danny Hoey]

If you don’t have a building plan in place and it’s as far out as you say, I would just rough grade it and dump quarry spalls for now. Finish the driveway after the house is done.

 

[HeyDude11]

I am a general contractor but I am not even going to try to guess at what to do here, because I live in a totally different area so what I would do is call a couple reputable med/larger excavating companies to come look at it and walk you through what they would do. Let each one of them tell you what they would do, more than likely your going to have a common denominator on material and amount of dirt work needed. You don’t have to use them but that will tell you what you need.

I am not saying a guy with a skid steer can’t do it but it sounds like he is just subcontracting everything out so your better off to look at people that can do it all in house.

 

[MallardSX2]

My driveway is 1000 feet long and 10 feet wide. I built a good locking base with 4's and had $15,000 in stone 4 years ago. I had a culvert and put that in myself. That doesn’t count one dollar towards any labor. I don’t think the guys cost is that out of line. Stone is super expensive right now. If I was to replace my driveway right now, it would for sure be over $20,000 in stone.

Which reminds me, I need to top dressed it one more time with 57's. That’s going to be another $1200.