At last, breaking some ground!
Two days with my favourite excavator and my tireless offsider waving the hose around to keep some of the dust down and the levels measured, and I’ve nearly got the ‘cut’ part of ‘cut and fill’ done.
The shed area was first – scraped the top ~150mm off first, to get all the grass and what topsoil exists into its own pile for later re-use, then got into digging. Hit the hard semi-sandstone’y type stuff pretty quickly, but managed to get through it ok. At its deepest I need to take ~800mm out from the shed area, in the south-western corner, and this produces a surprising amount of loose dirt when you pile it all up in one place.
The first pile hit 2m high pretty quickly, and then I kept adding to it sideways. After dad left I kept digging, but not worrying so much about where I was putting it – that resulted in a giant pile sitting on an area where I hadn’t dug yet, which wasn’t my smartest move ever.
Day 2 was the house area. I did this one slightly more intelligently by digging out the first patch, then moving on down the house in strips and putting the spoil from each strip on the previous strip’s area. Still left me with a big pile of dirt in the wrong place:
So next steps are to get a loader in to clean up this mess, and then I can dig the main services trench – this needs to go right the way down the block to deliver power to the ATU in the back corner, and run water pipes to and from the water tank.
