8.25.2024

Jim and I spent all morning and part of the afternoon investigating our email issues and working with multiple different Spectrum people.  What a mess.  But hopefully we have a solution and we can move forward.

Once we got outside, Jim continued to do some grading for water flow around the pavilion...

Before he did too much else, Jim took a bucketful from his dirt pile and took it over to the edge of the woods beyond the turnaround where he stores the Bobcat attachments, because it's getting low in some areas...

Flatting it out...

Scooping up the remainder of the gravel pile...

Putting it in the driveway to keep extending the gravelt...

Smoothing it out...

Next, we brought out the surveying equipment.  Jim wants to get an idea of elevations so he can work on extending the driveway back to where we have decided to build the new shed...

Starting to take elevations...

This is the area where we plan to build.  There aren't any pine trees right in the space we would build, and we would just have to cut down some of the trees we aren't fond of anyway.

But we do like to conserve as many pine trees as possible.  There are a bunch of small ones right where we would need to make the driveway, so Jim brought the excavator over and started scooping them up...

The thumb comes in handy for some of them...

Now we have a whole little row of trees that we'll transplant soon...

From this point where Jim is, things need to be flat.  This will help when we eventually build the house too...

Starting to dig a reference for Jim to use to see how much dirt he has to remove...

Jim would dig and then we would measure and then he would have to dig more...

Every time we do this kind of elevation work, I'm always fooled.  From where Jim is, he'll have to remove well over a foot of dirt to be flat!  When it looks flat!

Moving away the excess dirt from his reference hole...

Then we picked up all the rocks that we've been accumulating...

After Jim put all the tools and equipment away, he did some trimming around the house before calling it a day.

High 80.2/Low 55.7 - nice!