Finishing The Pit.

May 15:

This lizard supervised the entire project. I'm not kidding. I saw him observing almost every day.  Now, to continue, we were removing the old cellar:

Notice the orange ground stripes--we had to find and work around the power line to the well and the phone line. Of course we called Blue Stakes. You're not supposed to dig if you don't call Blue Stakes. The power line wasn't quite where the marks were, but we called Blue Stakes.

There was coal under the plywood floor, and we took it to the dump

Most of the timbers have been removed

An archeological find,

May 18 Gary and Tom broke up the old footings to manageable-sized pieces and hauled them away:

Notice the well's power line across the left corner and the phone line across the right.

May 20 to May 28: The digging continued. Tom and Gary were both here part of each week (some of the days overlapped), and between them the tractor was really busy. We have a lot of rocks here, many of which had to be dug out with a shovel, pick, and prybar. I'm surprised at the size of rock they were able to get into the bucket, and there were five that were too big and heavy and had to be dragged out--two of them with the truck.

We were lucky enough to find a foundation contractor who had a couple of other jobs in the area and agreed to do our job immediately after. We still had to make the hole another 3 or 4 feet longer and a bit wider, and then dig for the footings. We had to compress a week or more worth of digging into two and a half days.



May 29:   We removed the steps. It's a good thing I don't sleepwalk. It is about a 12 foot drop. Also, Tom spliced several feet into the power line to the well, so we could move that out of the way.

May 30: We were near the end when, oh no, another rock.

Chain it up.

Nope, not budging.

 Call in the cavalry.

Slowly let out the clutch and just idle it back.

Go, Greatheart!!

(Greatheart is my truck's name--he's grey and a prodigious puller).

OK, so it was a boulder, but to someone who has played on Big Rock at Squirrel Meadows, it's a rock.

Hmmm, storm across the lake.

And yes, after 30 years of blissful solitude, we will have visible neighbors. Two of them. With dogs and cats and children. Don't. Rub. It. In. (Really, both families are nice people--but that puppy! He's nice, too, but huge!! They call him Sarge, but I call him Baskerville.)

June 1:  Tom, hoping no more big rocks would mess things up, dug the footing trenches (with a shovel) to be the same depth as for the existing wall (This was originally the retaining wall at the side of our parking pad). Yes, that log is how I got in and out of the house.

The footings at the entry way had to be 3 feet deep. We dug them last, of course, because then the tractor would no longer be able to go into the pit to remove dirt.

Wouldn't you know it, just at the end, the last few feet right next to the footings for the existing wall, and just before the contractors showed up with their forms, Tom hit another big rock. They went to lunch, and he was still struggling with it when they got back.

The rock wasn't unduly large, it was just in an awkward place. One of the foundation guys helped Tom lift it out, and he helped them wherever he could.