Back Filling

June 6

Tom has the "floor" leveled out (a lot of shoveling) and is ready to start burying the power conduit and the pipe for the dust collection system.

The outside walls have two coats of tar.

Pipes buried and all smoothed out again

 June 8:

Digging a new trench for the well's power line

 June 10

The power line is buried along two walls and the trench backfilled up to driveway level

What's left of our lovely stone stairway

June 18:

The utility trenches and dirt that had been dug out of them in the back yard smoothed out to make working there safe.

June 19 and 20:
June was a very rainy month. We had a couple of good weather days predicted for the weekend so rented a ram compactor and got all our local children over to help backfill around the foundation. We also compacted the inside "floor" and added some road base. Russell made that his project in addition to helping with all the other stuff. Ben became the main operator of that bouncing foot, Tom and Gary ran the tractor and Debbie was "general labor." The process was: dump a couple of feet of dirt in the trench, spread it out, then whack it down. The level in the trench, including the footings, started about 9 feet down on the high side, and we gradually built it up to ground level.

 

getting some gravel for Russ to work on

dumping from the driveway

getting dirt from the reserve pile (see orange tractor in the distance)

dumping in the trench on the high side,

spreading and whacking

lifting the whacker out of the trench to tamp in the well's power line.

getting higher

taking the whacker back

and lowering it into the trench

whacking uphill is hard work

 protecting the phone line with pea gravel

which was brought up in the wheel barrow because they didn't want to wait for the tractor

the end is in sight.

We had to get the whacker back to the rental place before it closed, so no more pictures. The storm that had been threatening all day hit (hard) while they were loading the whacker into the truck. It was one of the heavier storms of the summer.



To be continued . . .