Our old sewer line runs right through our future basement. Obviously we need to dig that ridge of dirt out as well, so we have to put in a temporary line while we are living in the old house during construction. Because our old line under the street showed some root intrusion, we are requiredRead more about Moving the old sewer line[…]
We are now more than half way through excavation and our front your truly looks like a battle zone. The basement hole(s) are getting pretty wide and deep. The ridge separating the two holes is the old sewer line. On the far side of the hole is the replacement sewer line for the old houseRead more about More excavation, lots of rocks[…]
The surveyor mapped out the basement contours a couple of days ago to give the excavator a dig line; it is pretty much constant digging here now. The front yard has large holes everywhere. One thing we didn’t anticipate when planning on staying in the house was the difficulty of getting through the dig zoneRead more about Excavation is in full force[…]
And old Steve Martin joke … I’m always curious about history and as we dig am looking for any artifacts that I might find in the dirt we uncover. The first one turned up yesterday, an old bottle. Based on the markings on the bottom, I was able to identify that it is likely fromRead more about I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy[…]
Before excavation could start, everything in the way had to be removed, including the old asphalt, a couple of tree trunks, the old garage, old house foundation footings, etc. The excavator spend several good hours removing one giant tree trunk in particular. Here are our girls sitting on the trunk before it was removed. TheRead more about The beginning of excavation[…]
Our garage, built in 1942, was close to falling over on its own. It is in the way of the new driveway cut, so it is one of the first things that has to be done before we can start grading the lot and digging the basement. The excavation contractor noticed that the boards onRead more about Tearing down the old garage[…]
We moved the first three palms a few days ago. Today we moved the two largest ones, the tallest of which topped out at around 35 feet high, and the heaviest one (curiously, not the tallest one) topping out at 28,000 lbs. For this, they had to bring in a bigger crane, with an 80,000Read more about Moving the palms – moving day, part 2[…]
The crane showed up at around 6:30 this morning! All-in all it was a fascinating day of watching the tree service crew and the crane crew move three 17,000 – 20,000 lb. palm trees. Below are some nice shots. The process was to attach the crane pulling up and the backhoe pulling to the side,Read more about Moving the palms – moving day[…]
In order to dig one of the trenches around the palms, the tree company had to move some of the old building foundation out of the way. Turns out the skirt foundation wall wasn’t very impressive. That’s just three inches into the soil and absolutely no steel reinforcement in the concrete. compare that to theRead more about More history – sketchy foundation[…]
It’s been a busy day here at the project site. In preparation for the palm moving, a tree stump had to be extracted. It took a good 2-3 hours of digging with the backhoe to free that stump and it was quite a site to see it finally being moved. This is what the baseRead more about Moving the palms – prep, day 2[…]