The week before last we had a fair bit of snow – probably 6-8″ total over the week. Then things warmed up over the weekend and the precipitation continued, with 0.75″ or so rain on Sunday as the temperature briefly hovered around the freezing point. The result, somewhat predictably, was that our driveway became a massive sheet of ice, since the snow banks basically made walls that held the water on the driveway while the temperature dropped Sunday evening. Kind of like a luge track, which would be cool if it weren’t our driveway.
The van (despite its snow tires) was unable to get out when Amy went to pick the kids up from school Monday afternoon. Fortunately I was able to grab them and work the rest of the day from home. I tried to spread some salt by hand Monday night, and was pleased Tuesday morning when my test drive successfully got the van to the top of the drive. When we went to actually leave, though, it was unable to get any additional traction, and in the course of trying slid sideways and ended up wedged perpendicular to the driveway, blocking all access in or out and unable to move at all. Awesome. When the tow guy also got (temporarily) stuck, it became clear that we needed to do something about the ice.
So I headed over to the hardware store to get an spreader more suited to a long, hilly, curvy driveway than the little handheld one we’d used on the sidewalk in the city. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t the only ones struggling with ice, as they were out of all of the push spreaders, and had only tow-behind spreaders remaining.
We don’t have anything to tow it, but I figured I could make do by pushing on the tow connection, and not getting anything didn’t seem like a real option, given the state of the driveway.
I must have looked pretty silly Tuesday night in my snowshoes, crouched down over the spreader (in order to reach the tow connection) crab-walking up and down the driveway. That worked for the immediate need, but certainly wasn’t a real solution.
I kicked around a few different ideas for attaching a handle, and eventually settled on 1″ PVC, the interior diameter of which was just a bit bigger than the frame of the tow connection, but still small enough that the bolts would go through. A few bucks worth of connectors and caps, and I’ve got not only a comfortably positioned handle but a stand to hold the spreader upright when it’s parked.
