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Post date: May 30, 2015 1:57:39 AM
“What?” you say, “But you haven’t even finished the walls!” While the crew was completing the interior stud walls, I was outside pushing dirt around. And what I did most of today you might not call “landscaping”. But Eli called it that, and it seems right.
I have been annoyed with all the rocks in the soil, and have wanted to screen or pick them out since we first excavated for the foundations. Well, today that desire overcame me.
We have poured all the concrete, including the front porch and garage apron. From these latter we pulled the forms yesterday. That left a gorge between the walkable house and the street. Since Oraldo nearly fell into this gorge I wanted to fill it to reduce the risk of injury.
OK. So what do we put into those spaces around the foundation?. We have piles of dirt all around the house. At the bottom of this space I put whatever I could shovel in. But near the top I don’t want the have a lot of rocky soil for my plants. Therefore I started to pick the rocks out before I put the dirt.
That was yesterday, and the soil is mostly graded up to the house on the north side by the garage and the entry porch. (No so by the north end of the bedroom yet, where we still take a long step over a low area between the tool trailer and the house.But today I was thinking that we are about to put the sheathing on the outside of the stud walls, and there is a gap next to the foundation, making it harder to carry the panels up to the house and nail them on. Also, there are places where the rain puddles badly on the south side of the house - not that we will get more rain, but….
So I got a rake and a bucket and started pulling dirt from one pile closer to the house. In the process I would pick out the rocks.
Now the rocks here vary in size from about mango size (5-6”) down to small egg size (1”) with very little gravel. The rest is some sand, but mostly silt and clay. (This is in contrast with the with glacial till in Seattle, which varies continuously from silt up to rocks bigger than I can lift.)
So I am able to hand pick most of the rocks that bother me. I can already see that I will have to seek places to store or dispose of all the rocks. I can only comfortably carry about 4 gallons of rock. I must have made 20 trips to the rock pile while filling about 20 feet of foundation perimeter. Subtracting the garage and porch, that means I have about 150’ of foundation left.
This will be a long process!
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