4.13.2015

Another beautiful day - this was the first short-sleeve day of the year!  I had a doctor appointment so couldn't join Jim until the afternoon....but he was very busy all day!

He first moved this big pile of dirt in the foreground of the picture below - it was up next to the ditch where we're going to have to dig again.  So that required getting all the rocks out that you see next to the pile of dirt and moving the pile down.

Then he went back to work on the pour stops - the front corner is all done.

Jim did some diagonal measurements of the deck area - it was within 1/4" of being exactly the same size - unbelievable considering it is 584" on the diagonal measurement!  I told Jim I'm not surprised since he's so precise, but when you step back and think that we started just drawing the shape out on the ground, we had all those different step elevations in the footers, then we built a wall 10' tall on top of the footers and yet it's still so precise!

He was working on the back corner when I got there this afternoon...

He got the side piece on that will be the landing for the stairwell.  To refresh from last year, Jim put the extra deck pieces over where the stairs will be to keep snow out of the space below - so those pieces will have to be removed.  The pour stops around the stairwell will be a bit more complicated too.

Fastening everything down...

The birds eye view of the deck with the pour stops.

After that, we brought all the tools down from the deck and switched gears - time for some real manual work!  All of our trenches for the septic system were so perfect, clean and to the precise slope required.  And then we had that one bad day in November that prevented us from getting the septic tank in and basically shut us down for the winter.  The septic system has to be one of the very first big projects because we have all these open trenches across the driveway.  However, we had to wait until things dried out.  The soil here is so amazing - since it's so sandy, even with 3 feet of snow on it all winter, once the dirt thaws, things dry up very quickly.  Unfortunately, the winter caused lots of small cave-ins in our trenches and it's going to take some work to get them back in shape.

We had the electric, sewer and water lines in to this point in the trench where it was open but you couldn't see any of the pipes because of the cave-ins.  The excavator wouldn't reach this far so Jim had to uncover everything by hand and do a lot of shoveling.

But he found where we capped all the pipes...

Okay...now this was just terrifying to watch.  Jim needed to bridge the excavator over the trench so that he could position the bucket and be able to dig.  He put pieces of wood down and scooted the bucket forward on the ground to stabilize the front of the excavator while he drove over the trench until he could put the stabilizer blade down.  Very scary to see it hanging over the trench like that!

But it worked and Jim was able to position the bucket in the trench to do some digging.

 

High 75/Low 48 - Gorgeous!