JD450 to make driveway & house pad?

[herdfan]

I need to round up my camera and shoot some pics of the repair (and some of the equipment). It looks pretty good. The road contractor dug out the slide to a good base with an excavator and D6 and then used a huge excavator with a hammer on the arm to bust out about a 15-20 foot swath of rock in the hillside to move the entire road over onto the rock ledge and then filled in the gaping hole on the low side with the chipped out boulders. Moving the dirt around took about a week, but the rock work only took about a day, which was very good since the hammer rig was billed at $200/hr! /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif

 

[EddieWalker]

If you're going to need and excavator to dig out the dirt for the road, then you're talking about another expensive peice of equipment.

You'll also need a way to get the dirt from the excavation site to the road site. This means dump trucks.

Spreading the dirt isn't too hard, and the JD450 should be able to handle that, but since it's such a light machine, you're not going to get very good compaction right away.

This might not be a big issue for the road if you don't drive it when wet and allow it to settle over the years. If you want to pave the road, then campaction will be a huge issue.

As for the house pad, you MUST get good compaction! The number one issue with foundations cracking is poor compaction of the soil underneath. This means building up the soil in small lifts, like 4 inches at a time and running a sheeps foot or vibratory compactor over it.

All this is adding up to a very big job for one person to do. Not impossible, but very unlikely and extremely unpractible to do, especially since you have such a good price from a contractor to do it for you.

Just make sure he gets good compaction on your house site. Just running over the dirt with a dozer isn't going to be enough. Those treads really spread the weight around.

Good Luck,
Eddie Walker

 

[H20Buffalo4Sale]

I decided to hire out the work to a fellow who said that he could do it for $7,800 with bigger dozers, excavators, and more. He dug out a nice pond of about 15 to 20' deep and got a lot of good red clay and even more blue-gray clay.

We ended up going with a 600' long driveway to get back to higher ground instead of just a 300' one. He made the house pad only 5.5' high instead of 6' high because of the higher natural ground elevation which should have been above 136' or higher according to USGS maps.

After he was done with the dirt work we paid $1,000 for an elevation survey and it was determined that the natural ground is at least 5' lower than what the USGS maps indicate. So we need to have the house pad built up at least another 4' just to get out of the 100 year flood plain.

I am waiting on a new bid proposals for that. The fellow who has done the dirt work up to this point thinks that it will cost close to another $7,800 to raise the house pad another 4+ to 5' and keep the top of it 50 x 100' and raise the end portion of the driveway to meet it. Oh well, I wanted the pond to be larger anyway. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif And as my wife pointed out, we should be able to open the windows and get a lot of nice breezes with the home that high up above the surrounding ground.

I guess that my new neighbor was right. He said to plan on spending about twice as much as what people would tell me the work would cost.

I am still thinking about borrowing a JD450 to move some dirt. Thanks to everyone for their input.

 

[EddieWalker]

Sounds like you're doing it right! Did you get any pictures? We all love to see pictures of dirt being moved around.

 

[H20Buffalo4Sale]

I've got loads of pictures, but I don't want to bog down this site with them. Our new home was finally delivered this past Wed (see attached image named "home_on_pond_apart01cr_sm.jpg"). It is still in 2 pieces. They should have it put together, skirted, and finished out some time next week. The pond is looking nice, but the rest is still kind of rough. It will look much better after the dirt is smoothed out and grows grass on it.

The building on the left side in the background of the picture is 2 story antique cypress wood barn. You can only see the 2nd story in the picture. Several people have told us that the antique cypress wood planks on it are valuable. Apparently there are craftsmen who make things out them.

We have a long way to go toward getting the entire 41+ acres fenced. We hope to have about 1/3 of it enclosed within the next couple of weeks. So by then we ought to be able to move our animals out there and perhaps even ourselves.

 

[coopers]

Very cool, don't worry about the site, it can handle the pictures you want to upload. My parents did the same thing yrs ago. We had land cleared and we put a manufactured home on a 5 acre lot. Here's the John Deere 490E that I drove (I was 10is or younger) when he was working on our lot.

Blake
WA

 

[coopers]

Another

 

[H20Buffalo4Sale]

I've attached a picture of one of the excavators as it was carrying trees ripped from the earth to make room for the pond that provided fill dirt. The dirt was used to create a 600' long raised driveway and a house pad that is nearly 10' high.

 

[coopers]

Very cool

Blake
WA