Digging the Foundation:

3.10.12

I thought this would be the fun part. It all started innocently enough. I rented a Caterpillar 516E backhoe and started by clearing the topsoil. I set it aside to be used for final grading. It was easy to push over a few trees to make room for the excavated material. I wanted to pile it as close as possible to minimize the hours that I would put on the machine. It costs about $32 per hour to rent, plus delivery and pickup charges, not to mention diesel costs of $4.16 per gallon, so I wanted to be as efficient as possible.

Gerald's son, Ryan was acting supervisor that day...

After 7 hours on the counter, the backhoe quit and wouldn't restart. I checked all the fluids, then tried to start it again and it cranked right up. I started working again, but about 3 minutes later it quit again. it would repeat this over and over: 5 minutes off, 2-3 minutes on. I googled possible causes, but it wasn't overheating, and I had no ide of how to fix a fuel lift pump or find a faulty safety switch. I gave up and called the rental center to come pick it up.

So I had a 75% complete hole. Thankfully, the rental center agreed to let me rent a smaller backhoe for a weekend for a half day's charge. I thought that was fair. I just had to wait 2 weeks, since I was only able to work on the weekends.

I could use a weekend off. The thinking and planning is almost as hard as the work itself.

So 2 weeks later, a Kubota B26 showed up at the site. I immediately saw that I was in for a lot of work. This was like the difference between my little 2 path road and I-75 when it came to production. It took 16 hours to finish that next 25%.

Look how spring arrived in 2 weeks and almost all the trees sprouted green.

I also had to take frequent breaks and let Gerald work on it for a while, because the Kubota has a much tighter suspension and was very hard on my back. The work was slow going, as we had to loosen the clay with the backhoe, then trun around and haul it out when we got a big pile ready.