I set and re-set batter boards for laying the foundation five times to get the dimensions just right, which took a great deal of time and was probably ill advised, but I can't argue because it was my own council I was keeping.
I'd long considered renting a mini-excavator from Home Depot and doing the work myself, but then I saw and ad for a guy on KSL saying he'd work for $65 and hour. I couldn't imagine it would take him more than two hours, as the excavations were really pretty minor. $130 for two hours of a professional with a full sized backhoe compared to $440 (I think) for a day with a rented mini was too big a price disparity to ignore.
The only problem is that I desperately, desperately hate making phone calls to people I don't know. I think I have abnormal speech patterns, or a strange voice, or maybe both, and I often find that strangers on the other side of a telephone don't understand what I'm saying. I think I must rely a lot on non-verbal cues too to communicate, and they are obviously absent from phone calls.
Additionally, I desperately, desperately hate asking people for help, especially strangers. I once spent an hour and a half in the New York Public Library just watching people to figure out how their circulation system worked, rather than getting the answer in a minute by asking one of the librarians.
But, given that renting equipment would involve a fair amount of dealing with strangers and filling out official forms (another particular emotional stressor of mine), and the price disparity, I finally called the guy with the ad up and arranged with him to come do it. But he never showed up, and never called me back.
After a week of trying to get a hold of him and failing, I girded up my loins, or in other words, gathered my manhood, and went to the Home Depot two Saturday mornings ago. There I went through the emotionally taxing process previously described, and after 30 minutes or so in the rental office, I was pulling the truck around to hitch up the trailer with the tractor. Then the guy stopped me and said he couldn't rent it to me because my hitch ball was bumper mounted, rather than frame mounted. He asked if I could go borrow or rent a truck somewhere else. I considered it then said no. So I went back in and spent 15 minutes more undoing what I'd theretofore done.
Another week went by while I tried to think of people I'd feel comfortable asking to borrow a truck, but finally I decided to go back to the guy on KSL. I called him and left another message, then called him again and got him. He said he was on another job that was going long, but he could schedule me for the next monday morning. That was this last Monday morning. This time he showed up.
I really thought he was going to make short work of it. After all, he had a 20 inch bucket on his backhoe, and it was deep. And the arm was much longer than on the tractor I tried to rent. And he was a professional, with 26 years of experience. It said right in his ad that he could "do rings around mini-excavators". So I explained my staking to him and the width and depth of the excavations, and I sat back to watch the master at work.
A surprising amount of time went by while he bumbled through the first wall's excavation. He was very painstaking as he dug beside the batter boards I'd so carefully laid out and staked. None the less he bumbled his digging and pulled out two of four of the boards that delineated that wall. And it took him two and a half hours to do it.
I realized at that point that I'd forgotten my checkbook, so I rode home to get it and eat my lunch. By the time I got back he'd mostly completed cutting the trenches for the interior bearing walls. He had, however, dug them crooked.
He then proceeded to the north wall, and by that time seemed to be embarrassed by how long it was taking. He went a little faster, and dug out three of four batter boards on that side, and buried three or four of the steel stakes then compacted the earth over them with the wheels. Then he ran over one of the smaller batter boards and splintered it.
When he was digging out the foundation for the shed he far overcut the stakes, then buried them too. To fill those footings will take almost twice the volume of concrete than was called for.
Then he cut out the berms at the south and east ends of the yard that the county wanted me to get rid of for drainage. This involved him getting confused and piling all the dirt up in the south east corner, until I reminded him the the north west corner was supposed to be the highest spot in the yard. We were rolling up on six and a half hours at that point, and he was obsessively trying (but failing) to level the huge grassy pile of what used to be the berms back into the west side of the yard. He was just pushing and pulling the dirt back and forth, all the while with a huge grin of crazed concentration. I pulled the plug.
$422.50 was the final bill. It was a mess of a job, and I've spent two days out there so far, and will I suspect spend about a week more, just trying to fix his work with my little $6 shovel.
I took one lesson from it. For almost the same price, if I could have worked out the truck thing, I could have done it myself and got the experience to boot. And if I'd screwed it up, at least I wouldn't feel like I'd been cheated.
To be fair, the guy did try hard, and I very much doubt anyone had ever asked him to dig with the precision I was asking with my constraining batter boards. Especially not on a crampingly small lot like mine. It was a mistake to hire an elephant to do the job of, I don't know, maybe a badger. He was just too big to do the job well.
None the less, this marks a pretty significant step on the way. It's a step I was afraid to take, because it made it feel real and irrevocable. So I guess it's really begun.
1 comment:
Congratulations on your progress. Keep it up.
- Dad
Post a Comment