New Driveway and Polebarn

[rswyan]

MIke,

Thanks, I'm pretty pleased with the way it's turning out. It solved the problem of what to do with the old asphalt and saved some money (for base) in the process.

 

[rswyan]

Well lately the weather put a little damper on things ..... these photos are from about 10 or so days ago. The building pad is bare clay .... when it gets wet it turns into a gooey, sticky mess so I try and stay off of it as much as possible until it dries .... unfortunately the necessary conditions to dry it out are few and far between this time of year.

 

[rswyan]

Looking east.

 

[rswyan]

I took out another tree and trimmed out a little bit of the north edge of the site to move the building up, onto more solid, undisturbed soil, away from the southwest .... where the soil is still pretty spongy. And I decided to do away with the french drain trenches (due to trench collapse), in favor of a diversion channel on the north end and back side of the building ... I'll still put 4" flex perf pipe in the diversion channels and tie them into the rest of the drain system .... and probably fill them with gravel.

 

[rswyan]

This is the service trench for the gas and water lines ... it's probably 5' deep ..... you can see how much water ended up in it .... I've since pumped it out with a sump pump (immediately after the rain stopped) .... last time I looked it hadn't collapsed (.... but there is probably 6" of crud in the bottom of it), ...... alot of the other french drain trenches have had some collapse, particualrly the top edges. I may end up just filling the one open end on this one (at the edge of the pad) with sand and finishing it next year.

 

[rswyan]

Another shot. The moral of this story is: "Never dig more trench than you can backfill before it rains."

The woodpiles are no longer there - we split all of it last weekend and moved it up to the house. Unfortunately it was mostly all quaking aspen - which isn't the greatest for firewood ... but I'll burn it anyways.

 

[rswyan]

Part of the reason for the lack of progress on the building pad is I've been trying to get the old driveway near the house tied into the new driveway before the weather gets really, really bad.

This is the new turn-around loop. close to the garage.

 

[rswyan]

I rented a mini-excavator to help try and get some significant amount of work done ..... I've had alot of trenching to do still, plus alot of clay to move .... not having to unhook the dump trailer from the B2910 everytime I want to load it is alot more productive.

The unit is a Kubota KX91-3 .... 7000lb class machine with a 10' digging depth. I've really enjoyed the heated cab the last few days. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

 

[rswyan]

Another shot, looking back towards the house.

 

[rswyan]

I ripped all this asphalt up with the mini-ex .... in about 45 minutes. Using the backhoe on the B2910 it would have taken hours and there were some sections that I wouldn't have be able to do at all (uncracked asphalt that came up in large chunks)