A Proposal to Address the Slope in Front Alessandra Offers an Idea

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at length about our “problem slope” in front of the house. Today, our architect Alessandra has a proposal of how to deal with it.

Put simply, our problems are that the house is sitting “in a hole”, below the level of the land in front, and the driveway access is short and steep. We caused part of the problem by putting the house too far up the hill, where the property tapers to a triangle, which leaves us little room to adjust the slope by spreading out. (The core problem is that the property itself is steeper than we expected.)

Alessandra’s plan is to put the parking area at the very top of the property and put three terraces down to the house.

This does open up the front of the house and make the slope close to the house less severe, but I wonder if this isn’t causing other problems:

• Making the driveway even steeper
• Squeezing the parking area so it’s hard to turn around to go back up and to have enough room to have a “running start” to attack the driveway.

My knees are also asking about carrying stuff down from the parking to the house. (They don’t mind up as nearly as much as down.) Is the plan to just have a steep path or stairs? Can we do something more gradual?

Realistically, I don’t think we have many options other than this one of Alessandra’s — since we can’t buy more land, at least right now — but I’ve sent my thoughts off to Kevin.

An Update

Kevin got back to me with diagrams that addressed my questions, but I still wonder about that sloping driveway!

Here, he indicates the path they have planned. My guess is that it will need to be extended to reduce the slope further.

The next step is to get a reasonable estimate for the earth moving front and back. Francisc is getting bids from smaller suppliers, as their prices should be less than the bigger companies,

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