New Driveway and Polebarn

[rswyan]

Yesterday Jeff brought down the JD 310 and Zack brought down the Bobcat and the three of us took a whack at gradiing the pad. We worked about 7 hours on it. Unfortunately I didn't get any picture of the action - just the result.

Here's looking southeast onto the site from the driveway.

The big gully on the right middle edge of the picture is now gone.

 

[rswyan]

A view looking northeast.

With Jeff cutting the grade, and Zack using the Bobcat, and me using the boxblade on the Kubota we got quite a bit of dirt shoved around.

 

[rswyan]

A view looking west southwest.

 

[rswyan]

A view of the northeast corner of the pad. Here you can see how much we had to drop below grade to start getting something approaching level - probably about 2'.

The amount of topsoil removed from the pad was huge. We hauled off quite a bit, but often it was just me working by myself and I needed a place that I could get rid of it quickly .... so I dumped it around the edges of the pad. Eventually a good portion of it will be removed but I'll leave some to act as dams to redirect surface runoff away from the pad and into the drainage system. The surrounding area (north and east) slopes into the pad so surface runoff would be a problem.

 

[rswyan]

One of the growing rock piles.

 

[rswyan]

Another pile.

 

[rswyan]

The main one - it's grown a little. It will be where they all end up when I get a chance to haul them over to it.

 

[rswyan]

Quite a few buried in here .....

 

[rswyan]

That's all for the moment ... today I'm going to try and get a little more grading done and get things leveled out a bit better, clean out the corners and straighten the edges up.

Tommorrow, between 10AM and noon the truck with the building should be here. I wanted to at least have the approach directly in front of the building pad graded and graveled so they could spot the materials on it when they unloaded ... but I wasn't able to get that done .... so it's either spot it on the ungraveled approach or about 120' away up on the lawn ... we'll see which they prefer tomorrow morning. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[rswyan]

Time for a little update - the building arrived on the scheduled day - but they were about 7 hours late .... had some problem with lots of mud at their first drop. When they got here it was 7 PM, getting dark, and had just started to rain as they began to unload (so no pics.)

Watching them unload was pretty wild - the semi tractor itself had a built-in forklight - not one that came off - but one that was actually part of the tractor. When hauling, the lift sits down outside of, and around the 5th wheel.

The driver spotted the trailer and dropped it, and then raised the lift and inserted a pair of 6' or 7' long forks that must have weighed at least 150 lbs. each. After that he proceeded to use the semi tractor, in reverse, as a forklift ..... at night ..... in the rain .... looking through the rearview mirrors ...... the guy was great at it !!! Definitely wild to watch ....... Once they got everything unloaded, they tarped all the whitewood with black plastic so it wouldn't get wet.

It's supposed to be nice for the next few days so I'll try and get some pics to update this thread.