The Day the Earth Moved

It's a big day today, so maybe two posts will be necessary.

The guys showed up with the compacting equipment this morning, which is always a good sign.

They set to work compacting the soil they had already put down over the drains.

While they waited for the bobcat to arrive, I climbed on the pile to take the last ever picture of the big hole, on the last ever day of the pile. There'll still be piles of crap in the yard when this is done, but they will be smaller.

In the mean time, another crew is dropping in the tie-downs on the forms. These are cast into the concrete and hold the house securely to the foundation when the ground shifts around, as it does from time to time.

The bobcat showed up a little after ten. I wondered what they would do about that huge pile of gravel, but apparently the plan was to let the bobcat deal with it, which it did.

The first area of cleanup was the cleanout plume from the shotcrete.

Then the bobcat operator set to chewing up the pile: carefully scraping of the top layer of grass and shotcrete, then making a stack of relatively clean dirt to use as backfill.

He also helped the guys pull some of the larger chunks of concrete out of the hole, with chains when necessary.

Then he dumped some clean dirt down in the hole to be wetted, shoveled into place, and compacted in layers.

More later.

posted by ayse on 08/31/05