Moving dirt

I’m not making any money but I’ve sure been busy moving dirt around.  First off I spent close to a week redirecting rainwater on our neighbour’s yard. 

We dug the black dirt out on the north and east sides of the house and put in about 18” of clay fill.  We compacted that to direct rainwater away from the house and then put the black dirt back over top.  Eventually Keith is going to trench in some weeping tile at the edge of the clay to route the water past the house and into the storm drains.  He’s had a lot of water problems.

I spent yesterday building up the road by the Co-op’s bulk fuel tank.  The delivery truck has been digging some serious ruts.  We’ve hoping that a layer of compacted clay will help there as well.

Today I was east of town deepening a drainage ditch for a guy who says he currently has 4 sump pumps running constantly just to keep his basement dry.  He had a big trackhoe in some time ago to make a ditch but the operator left the trench with a hump in the middle so it wouldn’t actually drain the area it was intended to drain. 

In those pictures I’m straddling the ditch crosswise and digging over the side of the excavator tracks.  That went reasonably well except when it didn’t.  Occasionally the sides of the old trench caved in and dropped me into the trench.  One all but one occasion I was able to push myself out but one time I got pretty well buried and Monte had to come pull me out.  As you can see, there was plenty of water in the ditch.  I just started at the high end and carried 2 feet of water depth the whole way along the trench.  It was a little hard to see what I was doing in the muddy water but once it started running the water cleared up and I went back looking for obstructions.  There were a few but surprisingly few.

Our weather is scheduled to warm up tomorrow and that coincides with me being ready to start changing out the shingles on the house.  I finished up replacing the fascia boards tonight and I think that was the last thing holding up starting on the shingles.  So tomorrow morning I will strip about 5 feet on the west side and get at it.  There was water damage to the gyproc in the kitchen when we moved in which we think had to be caused by a roof problem.  I can’t see anything from outside but there is an area that is soft which roughly corresponds to the area that was damaged so I’m prepared for some roof repair in addition to the shingle replacement.