10.19.2013

Happy Sweetest Day, Jim!  I know it's a made-up, Ohio holiday but I'll never pass up an opportunity to celebrate us!

So last night, Jim said he would try and estimate how much sand, dirt and rock he's moved doing this trench.  Here's what he came up with...

• It's a 700' trench that is 3' deep.
• That equals out to 120 cubic yards of earth that had to be removed and then will have to be replaced.  As a comparison, the basement for a medium house is usually about 240 cubic yards.  So he's moved half a basement worth of dirt!
• Out of that trench, we removed approximately 45 tons of stone!
• Finally, along with a little help from the Bobcat, almost 40 tons of sand had to be hand placed in the trench!

Those are some crazy numbers and no wonder Jim sleeps well at night!  Pretty amazing.  We always say that no one realizes what goes into doing this by yourself...one of the reasons for this blog.  When you say you had to dig a trench, it sure sounds easy enough but when you are doing all the manual labor yourself and not with a crew - it's anything but.

So today it's back to work digging that sand.  Jim would like to get a layer of dirt on the downhill part of the trench from the driveway so that it doesn't wash away the sand if we get some rainy weather.

Evening update...

I got to the land about noon...these pictures never convey what it really looks like but the mountain ranges are really showing through now.

We ate lunch and then Jim put my new NY plates on my car!  I'm almost official - still need to get the car inspected and then I can put both of the stickers on my windshield.  And we still have to do our driver's licenses too. 

Before I got there, Jim had gotten all the sand finished over the top of the cable.  So the next steps were to put dirt on top of the sand, put the special caution tape down, and then totally backfill.  Again - sounds somewhat easier than the reality.  We have SO many rocks - you would think since I spent so much time picking rocks out when Jim dug the trench that there wouldn't be any left!  Ha - far from it!   You have to be careful with rocks on top of the cables - you don't want any issues down the road.  Although I'm sure contractors would have just backfilled, we took our time.  The first level right above the sand, we were pretty picky and tried not to get anything bigger than a baseball size rock.  For the final layer, we were a little less picky but still didn't want big rocks in there.

Here's Jim putting the tape over the final layer of sand.  The tape has to be there so in case someone ever digs in that spot, they'll hit the tape well before they hit anything else!

Then he shoveled a little dirt to keep the tape down.

Then, he would scoop dirt from all our piles next to the trench, back drag it so that I could get out the rocks, and then dump it in.

Then the last layer was not as gentle...

And finally, back dragging the area to grade it off.

And then it was back to repeating all those steps and moving on down the hill.  We really wanted to get as much of the steep part of the driveway done so that any rains wouldn't wash the sand away and require that process to have to be redone. 

Wonder how many scoops of dirt he took today?  Way too many to count!

Of course no job is complete without hand work...after the layer right on top of the sand, Jim would smooth it out before rolling the tape over it and then filling up the trench.

And this is how much we got done today - no more trench in sight!  If you look closely at the top of the hill, you can see a dirt pile - that's where the driveway is so we got all that done this afternoon!  Plus Jim got all the sand work finished before I got there.  A good day's work for sure!