excavation
Today’s the day Excavator Mike got busy. There was a lot of action on the site today as Excavator Mike started in digging for the foundation, plus the county road crews dumped a couple truck loads of gravel at the end of my drive and packed it and graded my entrance quite nicely for me. I’m not sure they had to do that, I think my wife may have sweet talked them into it.
It really feels like we’re started now. It was pretty exciting to see some actual construction activity occur. I’ve always been able to visualize the house, but seeing the excavation taking place really helped me get a sense of the scale of the house in relation to the lot. Pictures don’t convey it very well really. But that didn’t stop me from taking tons of them.
Excavator Mike was very precise–I was quite impressed at how he seemed to be in complete control of the machine. Not a lot of wasted movement.
There was a lot going on out at the site, several truckloads of gravel got delivered to the road crew working on widening and resurfacing 107th street. And the cattle seemed pretty interested in all the fun.
We didn’t expect to hit any rocks, and we haven’t even seen a single pebble. Nice black topsoil all the way down to about four feet.
I’ve seen backhoes digging, but this was a new one on me. Excavator Mike got the machine right down into the hole, and lifted bucketloads of dirt out after scraping the floor of the hole. I’m not sure what I expected, but not this exactly. Anyway, the pics show pretty well how the deal works.
The road crew sort of blocked us in so my wife went down to talk to them. She must have made a good impression, they gave me lots of gravel for my entrance, I don’t think any of the other lots got that treatment.
Excavator Mike left for the day with the hole about four feet deep. All the topsoil that was stacked to the north and south got piled up in a single large pile to the west. We climbed up for some photos, but darkness was descending, so we just got off a couple shots before running out of light entirely.
May 21st, 2003 at 7:57 am
Rob, I am quite impressed with the progress and the quality of your pics! Miles seems to be on top of things. Seems that you’re in good hands with Excavator Mike. I’m glad that the "Big Dig" has started!!