Can You Dig It?

We still had a few more things to do before Matt could pour the concrete footings. The main tasks were digging the footings and the electrical trench.

The electrical trench was no small feat. It had to run from the panel behind our hot tub, across the driveway, through the woods, down the hill, past grandmother’s house, and to the shed. A shorter segment connects the shed to the garage. We couldn’t exactly drive the excavator through the trees, so we rented a trencher. (We rented a similar one when we installed the propane.) This one can dig up to a 3 foot deep trench. We only needed to dig 2 feet, but it’s good to have extra length when you’re driving over bumps.

We started by the electrical panel/meter. We didn’t want to risk hitting any of the buried lines (electrical and propane), so we dug the first few feet by hand. With a pickaxe and garden hoe, I chipped away at this over a few days (my back could only handle so much). I thought I was done until I got the tape measure out and discovered my trench was only 16 inches deep. Sam helped finish it off.

Once we were certain we cleared the lines, Sam fired up the trencher.

I was too intimidated by the trencher to operate it. Luckily Buster stepped in to help. Unfortunately, he only had the strength for the flat section across the driveway.

While I constantly checked the depth, the cats guided Sam along the correct path.

It was going well until we got to the bank behind the shed. The conduit had to come down the hill and end up 24″ underground. Good thing we have a friend with a trencher attachment that happened to fit our telehandler.

Sam barely had enough reach, but he made it through.

We ran into another problem once we got through the bank. The ground in that spot was solid rock. I used our small excavator to continue the trench to the shed and to the garage. We’ve never run into rock quite like this before. It took me hours and was very violent. I felt like I was on a mechanical bull the whole time. Many of the rocks were wider than the trench. Needless to say, it was a slow process.

Meanwhile, Sam dug the footings with the big excavator. I think he made it around the entire perimeter of one building while I was working through the rock.

When Sam was done, he finished off my trench for me. I needed to turn around to get the last few feet, and I don’t have moves like these:

The cats love trenching, mostly because it creates soft mounds of dirt for them to dig in. Unfortunately, this meant we had to get the conduit in before the cats backfilled our trench. We returned the trencher and picked up 250 feet of 3″ conduit and some glue.

Laying the giant run of conduit went pretty well. We had to bend some pieces where it plunges down the hill. Sam concocted a tube heater with a chimney pipe, a heat gun, and a propane heater.

There was a real floppy segment of conduit when we extracted it from the heater. And, the heater was far away from the trench. I got in position and waited with the glue while Sam sprinted over with the 10 foot tube flopping around in the air like a wet noodle. It was so flexible, he had to be careful not to kink it. We fit it just in time before it cooled.

We decided to install a few more water spigots since everything was already torn up. We put one by the new shed and one by the hot tub. Now I won’t have to wrangle 100 feet of hose to fill the hot tub!

We terminated the conduit and secured it to boards inside the future walls of the buildings.

We got the laser out and tuned everything up before Matt set up the forms.

We’re ready for concrete!