foundation
Apr. 25th, 2021 07:27 amvia https://ift.tt/3ex4NoL
So yesterday, much to my excitement, BIL managed to get the day off from going to the farmer’s market, and instead came out with me to the tiny house site and we started work.
First he hooked up the tractor to the various bits of equipment parked on the space– this is a flat area located between the farm road and the creek, just across the farm road from the main garden, about level with the greenhouse and cold frame. When I had the yurt set up, this meant I could reel out a 100ft extension cord to the greenhouse’s outlet, and have power enough to charge my phone and laptop and have some electric lights. The eventual plan is to redo all of that wiring and to bury a dedicated power line out to the new house, but we’re not there yet; I’ll be on extension cord or I’ll have to buy a battery pack until then.
Anyway once the various implements were moved– either up to the gravel bank (which is the flat area in the middle of the farm where equipment is stored, as the soil is too thin to support much plant life)– or just farther along on the space, which is much larger than I need for this house– then BIL and I set posts in the corners, double-checked that it was square, and tied some lengths of string around it to figure out how much work would be needed to level it.
(cut for length; behind this is a description of digging a foundation for a gravel pad, and a photo!)
(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicornduke https://tmblr.co/mVpJNDQaUH5cHEJCTfGjjzQ from DW stopped
by during some of this, to chat– it was the two weekiversary of her second
vaccine shot which is awesome, and she was about to embark on the
Washington County Fiber Tour, and I badly wanted to go along but this was
my chance to get the foundation dug so I was doing it! She wound up being
actually really helpful through the whole thing, as she is wont to be. How
many friends do you have who typically show up to hang out and
coincidentally have a multitool and work gloves in their pockets, which
they then get out to use at the first hint of necessity? LOL.)
So BIL dug out the area, and then some, and collected the topsoil in a big pile. (Now what? Honestly there are some thin areas of the garden that really need it. Possibly that will be a project for another time.) As he was digging, he discovered a huge rock over near the edge of the site, square on the corners like it was shaped on purpose. So once he’d finished digging most of the site out, he went and I helped him put the backhoe attachment onto the tractor, and he came back and got that rock out. It’s huge– probably 18x18x24″, and square on five of the six surfaces. He managed to lift it out of the excavation site, and flip it up onto the level ground, and the plan is to flop it around and have it be a porch step.
[img desc: a large rectangular rock with one rounded/broken corner, flipped on its edge in a hole with part of the excavator attachment on the tractor visible behind it]
It’s likely the first white farmers on the site threw it down in that spot to stabilize the stream bank, as there was a collection of large rocks in that area, some of which were bricks. There was another stone just like it off to the side, but no possible way to get the excavator around it, so we just took the one. There were a few pottery shards too– nothing particularly recognizable, but identifiably worked material. The stream has since eroded a few feet down in the stream bed, and there are naturally rather a lot of large rocks through that area, but the arrangement of these made it seem like probably they’d been placed deliberately. Since the Morrison family started working the site before the Revolutionary War, there’s a fairly high likelihood that’s among some of the first improvements they made, to keep that little nameless (to us, anyway) stream in its banks. It doesn’t leave them, now; I chose that site for the yurt partly because it was right by the creek but had not flooded or destabilized even during Hurricane Irene a couple of years before.
Reassuringly, as he dug, the site is largely gravel underneath anyway. I really don’t think I’ll have trouble with the site draining. But i knew that.
Once the site was dug out, BIL went up to the gravel bank– which, yes, it’s a cute name for the place to park the equipment, but it is also genuinely a gravel bank, the farm is estimated to have about a million dollars worth of gravel on it but the easement they used to buy it bars them from ever selling it. However, they can use it! So it seems dumb for me to spend $500 and buy a load of gravel from the gravel mine a mile down the road when I could just– use the gravel from the same deposit that is already on the farm– and started digging out a front-loader bucket at a time of gravel. It’s not washed or sorted or graded, but it’s pretty gravelly gravel. He estimated he’d need 15, and then as he went along he was like mm probably 20…
anyway he worked on that for a couple of hours, and I went in and baked a cake for a dinner thing the family was going to, and watched the kid, so that FS could go to the market and get the truck back and help tear down and such.
Then I went out and got a 5 gallon drywall bucket and the 3 gallon metal pail I had used for ashes in the yurt (it had fallen out and not burned, ironically enough), and took myself just across the farm road into the main vegetable/flower garden for the farm, and started collecting the rocks they’d picked out of the beds there by hand, and ferrying them across the road and dumping them into the building site. It’s painstaking and stupidly ineffecient and small-scale, but it felt like the only thing I could do to help.
After a while VM came by and was like “what are you doing to your body put that pail in a garden cart”, and went and got me a garden cart. He was appreciative, though; there’s no real effective way to get the rocks out of the soil, and it’s a pain to work around them. You can get big mechanical rock pickers but they don’t do a very good job at sorting the dirt out, so mostly what they do is strip your topsoil and leave you with a terrible garden bed that’s mostly subsoil and in the case of this place, is likely even more just plain gravel. In a farm made largely out of gravel deposits, this is not a useful thing.
(Worth noting that someone at some point must have run a rock picker over the garden, and dumped the contents over near where I’m building; that’s how the bank is stabilized a little farther along. My first thought was to haul those rocks up to the site, and then I realized how stupid that would be; they’re useful as part of the stream bank, and the ones in the garden need to be removed. I could see a pile where the new person doing flowers had picked a bunch of huge rocks out of her bed as she’d prepared it, and stacked them in the corner– I went over there and filled a milk crate with those rocks, and put it into the garden cart.
So I hauled about 300 pounds of rocks out of there in a couple of hours of work, and dumped them into the drainage trench that I knew BIL would have trouble reaching with the bucket loader so we’d have to be shoveling into anyway.
Gonna go back out this morning and try to do another couple hundred pounds of rocks. He’s getting like– 15-20 tons of gravel and sand, and I’m gonna contribute 500 pounds if I’m lucky, but I feel like it helps, and anyway it’s good to get the rocks out of the garden. It’s a hell of a workout.
Then at noon the assistant livestock manager is processing one of his little kunekune pigs for personal use, and I’d said I’d help until 2, and then I really need to hit the road and get back to Buffalo. Work tomorrow morning at 6am, and then my second vaccine shot is at 3pm, and i plan to take Tuesday off if I have any symptoms– and if maybe my symptoms are having hauled 500 pounds of rocks by hand, well then I deserve a day off anyway and nobody at work needs to really know where my body aches came from.
Ow.
Anyway here’s the site in progress:
[image description: a flat stretch of field half dug-up, with the pile of moved dirt in the center of the picture, and in the right foreground is a red tractor with a bucket on the front and my BIL driving it. The view beyond is a lovely green hillside, fringed at the edge with trees.] (Your picture was not posted)
