The area around the shop is looking more and more like a junkyard. Plus, rodents are getting into many of our vehicles. Mice seem to think air filters are comfortable death beds, and I lost track of the number times squirrels have chewed through a wire in the scissor lift. So, we are building a garage and “shed.”
We hired our concrete contractor, Matt, and his crew to do most of the construction for us. Woohoo! However, there is still a lot of work to do on our side, beginning with the design. The garage is 36′ x 120′ and will house all of the vehicles (cars, trucks, construction equipment, the boat, everything).
The “shed” (more like an open air palace), is 16′ x 77′. It has a roof and siding but no doors. We can keep all the dirty equipment in it, like excavator buckets, fire tools, water pumps, fuel tanks, etc. It will also have 20 ft wide storage racks for metal and such that can be accessed with the fork lift.
Once we determined the size of the buildings, we had to figure out where to fit them. There simply wasn’t enough room. So…we made room. But first, we had to move a few rocks out of the way. They seemed to be multiplying while Sam was relocating them.
Oh yeah- Sam got a new toy. He’s leasing a telehandler which makes things like moving hundreds of rocks much easier. It’s also good for plowing snow.
Sam finished a few days later, and we were able to take some better measurements. There was definitely not enough room…we would have to cut into the hill A LOT.
The Kreps graciously lent us a Kobelco 200 excavator-
and a D7 Caterpillar.
The job would have taken us five times as long with our machines. We needed more operators for the extra machines, so Sam recruited Jackson for a few days…
And our friend Ian flew in from Texas to help.
They began cutting into the hill.
The boys pushed the dirt off the edge of the existing driveway area, filling in a valley.
The dozers compacted the dirt as they added material down the hill.
There was so much dirt. Over 2000 cubic yards got pushed over the bank until the landing area was about 40 ft wider than when we started. (The new part of the landing is the darker dirt shown below. It used to drop off where the rock pile is.)
The valley couldn’t accommodate any more dirt (or we would start to bury trees). Plus, our smaller dozer was struggling to make it back up the hill.
I was hearing Thomas the tank engine while watching Sam:
The rest of the dirt had to be trucked away. Matt’s son brought a 5 yard dump truck over to carry the dirt down the driveway to a future “turn around” spot. He made at least 50 trips over two days. Maybe more. We pretty much carved an Olympic sized swimming pool into the hill by the end of this.
Although it was a pleasant 70 degrees most of the week, Ian felt like he was in Texas while operating the D7. It has a reversible fan that blows hot air forward in the summer and hot air on the operator in the winter. Winter mode also blows the debris out of the radiator, keeping it nice and clean. This sounds like a great feature, but apparently it feels like “getting sandblasted in the face”. So, on Ian’s last day, they reversed the fan. (I guess he didn’t complain enough the first few days.)
There was the on-going dilemma of making more space by cutting further back into the hill. We didn’t want to make a retaining wall, so we tried to keep the slope less than 40 degrees.
But if you maintain that angle, you gain less and less space the further back you cut into the hill. So where do we stop?! When there is barely enough room to drive around the back of the building with a wide load. We kept measuring, and Sam kept removing material. The tallest part of the bank now is about 18 feet. I wish I had a video of the cow walking up it or Smokey clumsily scrambling down it. (No animal has made a second attempt.)
We didn’t want to cut down any nice trees either. However, we soon realized we had enough trees and that it was silly to compromise on the size of the building. So, we plucked a few more trees and widened the area. Now I can’t even tell where the missing trees were.
Sam and I were finally happy with the space. Plus, a large area for driving was created.
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