Constructing a Temporary Driveway

You may find from time to time that you need to construct a temporary driveway. This could be because you are starting a building project and you want to protect what you can of your lawn while diggers, dumper trucks and the like make their way over it. Or it could be that you are involved in a local event at a school sports field, or other open area, and you want to be able to provide temporary access and parking for visitors, without ending up with a rutted quagmire full of stranded cars if it rains.

Temporary Driveways with Mesh Protected Turf

There are a number of products on the market that can help out, either for hire or to buy, when you need a temporary driveway. At the lower end of the market there is mesh protected turf, a stiff plastic mesh which can be laid over existing grassy areas. This approach is popular for camping and caravanning sites or with pub owners who need to provide overspill parking. The mesh is pegged down to keep it in place as cars drive over it.

It's not able to deal with very rough ground or very heavy traffic but it will work well on existing areas of lawn. Note that if the grass is long it will need to be cut short before putting the mesh down, as otherwise the grass will fold over rather than grow through it. Once the grass has begun to grow through it can be mown as usual, and the mesh itself can be left down permanently, or taken up and stored if it's only used once or twice a year.

Heavier Duty Temporary Driveways

This sort of product won’t cope with even the small construction machines that you are likely to need on a domestic building project though. For that you will need to move up a scale into the area of hard metal or plastic temporary driveways. There are quite a few of these on the market and the price generally reflects the loads that they can withstand.

For example, if you have a difficult site and you have to get a crane in to lift loads into it, or perhaps place a pre-fabricated building or section, you will need a heavy duty road system which will be expensive to buy and require semi-skilled labour to fit. If it is only to solve a one-off access problem then you can hire the temporary driveway in and get it removed the next day, so that makes the cost more bearable.

Of course, applications like this aren't only about protecting your lawn, they are also about health and safety, as a large vehicle can slide or tip over under load if it's not on a secure footing.

Make Sure it's Worth it

Unless you have a particular problem like this during a building project, you might not think it's worth getting a temporary driveway. As long as the ground is safe and secure for the builder's vehicles and the access is wide enough, it might be cheaper to let them churn the garden up and then landscape it, or even just re-turf it if you're lucky, once the work is complete.