This is part four in the pond building story from late last fall, part 1 starts here
It's dug- From October 29, 2012 -MORNING
 |
| Hole is dug and collar is patched. Now for the bottom drain. |
We have hole. It is 3.5 deep at the deepest section. 2.5 deep in the shallows. Getting it to this point created quite a mess and we ended up having to make multiple trips with a huge dump truck to get rid the clay. Here is where I'm starting from this morning. Getting the little BD tunnel under the collar dug was a giganormous PIA. It was 100% of the evil rock clay garbage that oddly had gravel in it here as well, making it way worse. It involved laying on the ground and chipping at it bit by tiny bit. I am almost positive that there must have been a simpler way to do this but it is beyond me what it was. Oh well that part is done-hopefully.
We rented a trench machine thing to dig out the trench for the drain to the ditch. It sort of is like a bulldozer with a giant chain saw on the front of it. Scary stuff. Today's trick will be getting the bottom drain pipe right at the bottom of a 4' trench that is six inches wide. Off to work!
October 29, 2012 Night
Drat It's Stuck
Stacy's Should have been obvious tip of the day: If you are going to use ginormous machines to make deep and very narrow trenches, make sure they are absolutely perfectly perfect straight, because there is no play for mistakes in a six inch hole when the pipe is 4" wide and ten feet long and digging tiny deep trenches wider sucks. Sigh
After all day in the cold I'm about 2/3 done with the bottom drain plumbing. Which as a reminder is about 50 feet long. Heh. It turned out to be waaaaay harder than I thought because there was no room to maneuver in my slender trench, I kept getting loose dirt from the trench sides in the trench and good grief ten feet of that fat stuff is heavy and unwieldy. Also my tiny tunnel under the collar did not lend itself to threading the needle with a big fat pipe with a 45 on the end. <--Oops # 234
Trying to get it all right was exhausting. Since it is drained by gravity is is really important that the pitch of it is correct. Water left standing in the pipe will be bad. However lifting those huge sections of pipe in and out of that narrow trench made it really tempting to just start taking short cuts. I didn't but was tempted. I was crying at one point, and threw a shovel across the yard at another. :)
After much fussing and whining, and threatening Spazzy McDrool with the pound if he kicked more dirt in my trench, I think I finally have it all pitched right. Tomorrow I hope to finish final connections, backfill it all, concrete the drain in, get the mud pile covered with a thick topping of mulch so the dog stops dragging it all into the house and them maybe Monday underlayment and liner?<<--{This is so not close to what really will likely get done but it's fun to dream.} Tomorrow morning is shot due to the squirt's hockey game. Fingers crossed afternoon weather is good.
 |
| Got leaves? |
Stacy
No comments:
Post a Comment