With your description of your excavation as being 30' x 40' x 8' sloping to 2', you will be moving about 250 yards of compacted dirt. When it's loose, it will probably be 1/3 bigger or maybe 350 yards. The tractor you describe will have a bucket that will average 1/4 yard at best. That means around 1,400 buckets. of dirt. Do you really have that much time?
Actually he said the
house was 30' x 40'. The excavation is along the 40' wall where the dirt is 2' to 8' high. He didn't say how wide the excavation was, but if we go with your figures of 30' wide (probably too much) 1400 loads would be 7000 minutes at 5 minutes per load.
As I see it this works out to ~117 hours.
Frank doesn't say what his situation is, but if he could work solidly at it, 40 hours per week it is about 3 weeks. If he has to do it on weekends, it is going to take longer.
Bottom line is that 120 hours won't come anywhere close to wearing out a tractor.
My JD 110 has a bucket capacity of ~1/2 yard, and so does a Kubota
L39. While both of these are a bit over 35 hp, they are both in the 35 hp range. The larger size bucket might cut the job time in half.
It sort of depends on motivation and other time demands. My 80 year old neighbor moves 30 to 40 1/4 yard buckets of dirt some days in 4 to 5 hours.
18 years ago I tore down my old house in the SF Bay area and built a completely new one in its place, while working a 40 hour job. Working with one helper, it took two solid years of every weekend, every holiday, and all 3 weeks of vacation both years. Of course I had the motivation that once I started the value of the house was almost nothing until I finished. Once it was finished, I had added $400k to the value of the property, with an expenditure of maybe half that much.
