A little thing about dirt

I don't know why I wanted to use the stone from the excavated material as the drainage material instead of just throwing it all out and bringing in new stone - I just did. It would have been less work to throw out the old and bring in the new, but I got it in my head that I wanted to sift out the stones from the dirt and use that -- call me crazy. I guess I am so used to sifting out the dirt from my garden that I just thought that it was normal. My garden, by the way, is the topic of another blog story.

As I mentioned before, the properties here are postage size - mine is about 6000 SF (about 55 feet wide by 100 feet deep). I have also created a garden around the house taking away all the grass and replacing it with gardens of all kinds. The consequence of that for my house work is that I have little lay down area in which to work. I have a driveway and a sidewalk along the driveway, an area about 8 feet deep by 25 feet wide in front of the house - and that's it. However, when one needs to dig a tench that is 6 feet deep, you would be surprised how much lay down area you need. Combine that with the fact that the dirt is sifted and separated into the stones and the dirt.

So the way it would go, I would fill up this area next to the driveway with as much dirt as I could. You can see the wheel of the wheelbarrow and the wood frame of the sifter to the bottom left of the picture.

That would then get sifted and separated between the sandy material ....

and the stones.

And as this excavated material coming out of the ground was sifted and became a small pile,

The sifted out piles became bigger.

And so it went for about 3 or 4 rounds - fill up the sidewalk, sift it out and put the separated piles of stone and dirt at the top of the driveway, place the drainage layer (sifted out stones) and soil in back of the drainage layer against the foundation after the foundation was waterproofed, then excavate more material out, fill up the sidewalk again, and so on. I can't tell you what possessed me to do this - it did get done eventually. I did hire a guy from a company for a few days, but they were inconsistent. Once I found a company that provide a fair work staff, I was able to get more stuff done. But that didn't happen for this phase of the work, unfortunately. For this work, I would spend time of the phone calling to see where so-and-so was and why wasn't he here. I did about 80 percent of this work myself because of it.

Now that the work is done, and I see the results of foundation and how water reacts, it makes all the difference in the world.

July 16, 2009