Paving with old shingles is pure hoopie

Dec 12, 2022

Paving a driveway with old asphalt shingles is about as hoopie an idea as any idea ever thought of, and I’m proud to be the one who thought of it.

This ranks right up there with my brilliant idea from last year of cutting discarded carpet into runners and laying them between rows in my vegetable garden to keep down the weeds. (With the side benefit that my dear wife's feet will touch only carpet as she picks pole beans.)

I will admit the shingle paving idea is not entirely original. I was inspired by youthful memories of driveways I had seen paved with the tab cutouts from three-tab shingles. Those cutouts were a waste product of shingle plants like the old T-K Roofing Co. in the north end of Chester, and were bought by the truckload by those lucky enough to get them.

Dumped into the bed of a pickup truck they would have looked like a pile of five-inch licorice sticks decorated with candy sprinkles. When shoveled and raked level on a dirt or slag driveway, then compacted by traffic and fused by the heat of the sun, they hardened into a nigh-indestructible amorphous pavement. And talk about traction!

Those old tab cutout driveways were pure hoopie: cheap, easy, and a minus-10 on the aesthetic scale. My adaptation, using actual torn-off shingles, is not quite as easy, but even cheaper and a minus-20, capable of calling up actual bile into the mouths of the aesthetically sensitive.

Should you wish to try this yourself, I’m pretty sure this type of paving is disallowed by your zoning or homeowner association regulations. I live in West Virginia, where anything goes. Do it anyway and you can truthfully say it is asphalt paving.

I like to think of my creation as "environmental art." I am an artist, my muse is eco-thrift, and my medium is junk shingles. My work makes a statement, and that statement is "I am so hoopie."

I was not too far along in my project to re-roof our dome home when I began to fret about what I was going to do with the volume of old shingles I was tearing off. The county recycling center, fondly known to the Millers as the dump, is handily adjacent to our farm, and though I am on cordial terms with the staff there, they are not allowed to take construction debris. Rules are rules.

(They say you know you’re a hoopie if you come back from the dump with more than you took, and generally I do. People throw away good stuff.)

I could have ordered a roll-off trash container for the old shingles, but it would still be sitting in our driveway come next Easter because I’m roofing the house by myself, mostly, and I’m only halfway done, with winter closing in. Besides, I’m cheap, and roll-off containers are not.

Right now you’re thinking to yourself, "But what about the nails!!???"

Right-O. Torn-off shingles would be pincushioned with roofing nails, and roofing nails are perfectly designed to puncture car tires.

My old roof, however, was put on with roofing staples. (I put that roof on 40 years ago, and honestly I don't remember using a staple gun, but I must have.)

The shape of a staple, I think, and hope, makes it less likely than a roofing nail to pierce a tire, but theoretically it could. So, I’m doing three things. One, I’m meticulously picking out the staples. Two, all shingles are placed so that any staples, if missed, would point down. And, three, I’m not using these shingles on our driveway, no, sir. I’m using them on the back road to the garage apartment, and on a farm dirt lane.

My driveway, as longtime readers of this column know, is a 1,500-foot miracle of civil engineering, paved with a variety of used bricks, mostly two-by-four-by-eight house bricks I scrounged from demolition sites. I collected at least 80,000 bricks and hand-laid them over a period of 15 years. Most of those bricks, (including the most recent, those from the Orlando's Pizza building, for you East Liverpool nostalgia buffs) would have been landfilled had I not stolen, I mean, reclaimed, them, 400 bricks at a time in my pickup truck.

Have I impressed you yet with my innate hoopie talent for salvage? For turning straw into gold, as it were? Truthfully, all it takes is a thrifty mindset, a strong back and absolutely no pride. Even non-hoopies can do it.

To top it all off, my frugal hoopie ethos concerning shingles has miraculously fallen in sync with current environmental doctrine and practice. An asphalt paving industry magazine reports that starting about 30 years ago, at least two million tons of torn-off shingles annually, which once would have been landfilled as trash, are cleaned of nails and debris, ground up and used in highway construction, saving billions in resources, meaning oil. (What! Oil? No!)

Who says hoopies can't be green?

(Fred Miller's third book, "A Dead Carp on Shadyside Ave." priced at only $10, is the perfect Christmas gift for the literary lion in your family, available locally at Calcutta Giant Eagle, Pottery City Antique Mall, Museum of Ceramics, Frank's Pastries, Connie's Corner Restaurant, Davis Bros. pharmacies and the Old Ft. Steuben gift shop.)

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