Windham County roads take a beating. Spring thaw heaves the surface, summer storms cut ruts and wash out culverts, and by fall a dirt road that was smooth in May can be badly out of shape. The fix is usually straightforward once you understand what the water is doing, but getting that wrong is expensive. A load of gravel spread over a road with a broken crown and a silted ditch just disappears into the mud by the following spring. The gravel did not fail; the drainage failed.
Windham County Grading was started to address that directly. Every job begins with a drainage diagnosis before any blade work or material gets ordered. We look at where the water is entering the road surface and whether the crown is shedding it toward the ditches. From there we check whether the ditches are moving it away and whether the culverts are sized and positioned to carry the flow from the watershed above. That sequence matters. Reshaping a road without clearing the ditch first pushes water back into the surface you just graded. Installing a culvert without checking its diameter against the drainage area it serves means it backs up in the first heavy rain and undermines the road bed.
We work with individual homeowners who maintain a private driveway and with road associations responsible for miles of unpaved road that dozens of households depend on. The scope is different, but the diagnostic approach is the same. Get the water off the surface and moving through the ditch, the culvert and away from the traveled way. When that system is working, the surface holds and the gravel stays where it belongs.
Our work covers Windham County, Vermont. If you have a road or driveway that is rutting, holding water, washing out at the edges or dropping material over a culvert, call us and we will take a look.
Our story
Where this work comes from
Most of the calls we get follow the same pattern. A homeowner has been adding gravel every year or two and the road still gets worse. A road association has a problem culvert that floods the same low spot every time it rains. A driveway has a washout that appeared after a storm and nobody is sure what caused it.
In almost every case, the underlying problem is drainage. Gravel does not wear out that quickly on a low-traffic private road. What happens is that the crown flattens over time, water sits on the surface instead of shedding to the sides, and the ditches fill with sediment. Once the ditches stop moving water, the road bed softens. The surface deteriorates from the bottom up.
Understanding that sequence is what shapes how we work. We look at the whole drainage picture on a site before we recommend anything. That sometimes means the solution is less than a property owner expected, because the road does not need a full rebuild, it needs a ditch cleaned and a culvert replaced. It sometimes means more, because the problem has been misread for years and the base needs attention before the surface will hold. Either way, the diagnosis comes first.
How we work
How we approach a job
We start by walking the road or driveway with you. That conversation matters because you have watched how the site behaves in rain, where the worst sections are and what has been tried before. Combined with what we can read from the slope, the ditch condition and the culvert outlets, that gives us a clear picture before any equipment moves.
From there we work in the order the water does: crown and surface grade first, then ditching to carry runoff away from the road, then culverts to move it through and downhill. If surface material is needed, it goes down last, onto a surface that is already draining correctly.
For road associations we can set up a maintenance plan so that seasonal grading, ditch clearing and culvert inspection happen on a schedule rather than after damage is already done. Catching a silted culvert or a flattened crown early costs a fraction of what washout repair costs after a storm. We handle the work so the association board does not have to coordinate multiple contractors or make judgment calls about equipment and timing.
Who we serve
Who we work for
Most of our customers fall into two groups. The first is homeowners with a private driveway or a short access road, often unpaved, that has gotten rougher over the years or taken storm damage. These are people who want the work explained and want the driveway to stay fixed, not just look fixed until the next rain.
The second group is road associations. Windham County has a lot of unpaved private roads maintained by the households along them, and those associations need a contractor who understands the full scope of road maintenance, not just grading. Ditching, culvert sizing, surface material selection and seasonal timing all factor into whether a road holds up or keeps costing money. We work with association road commissioners directly and can document the work done for association records.
Both groups get the same starting point: a look at the drainage before anything else is scheduled.
The short version
At a glance
Get it sorted
Ready to sort out your road or driveway?
Give us a call or send an email and we'll set up a time to come out and take a look.