Site Preparation — Building up the Pad

This past week has been spent with various aspects of making life a bit more comfortable on the homestead. Such things as repairing a burnt out water heater caused us to learn a few new things(an error made by our electrician after power was supplied caused the tank to fill to only halfway, above which one of the heating elements burned out, shorted out the tank and began leaking).

We also began unpacking those things we will need during our stay in the RV and organizing things to allow some convenience. The bathroom inside the workshop is excellent… the washer and dryer are very handy… this is so much better already than the RV living we did during our evacuation from New Orleans after Katrina.

When we envisioned building ourselves, we really had not planned to do the site preparation ourselves, thinking it must be something to hire out. However, once we got the estimated cost of $7800 to build it up, we decided to put pencil to paper and see if that seemed reasonable.

After calling the local suppliers of fill dirt to compare pricing, getting information from them about compaction and delivery, we calculated how much fill dirt we would need to build up the pad to the desired 9″ or so. We also checked pricing on rental equipment and called up a brother in law with lots of dirt-moving experience. He provided some excellent tips regarding what type of equipment to rent, how to compact the dirt properly, etc.

After all this, we figured we could do it ourselves for less than half the cost. About $2400 in fill dirt ($11/ton in large loads; $16/ton for the last 15-ton load), and about $750 for a 3-day rental on the bobcat came to only $3150. We still need to rent the roller, but don’t expect that to be terribly expensive, perhaps no more than $150. On this first thing, we were able to save about $3500 by doing the work ourselves. Granted, it took a bit of time to master the technique of spreading the fill dirt evenly, so it may have taken an extra day of equipment rental, but it was still well worth the effort.

The work on preparing the site for building the house began on Monday morning with the renting of a bobcat for site preparation. Over the weekend, DH and the boys used the laser leveling gear to determine just how much slope there was to the building site. As it happens, it was only about 6″ total, so pretty level to begin with. After that, DH used the bobcat to scrape away the vegetation and dig the (very hard) surface off to prepare to add fill dirt.

The delivery of the fill dirt was very interesting. Arriving in very large trucks, they delivered 25 tons per truck (100 tons total) the first day… another 100 tons the second day and a final 15 tons in a smaller truck to finish off on the third day. On the second day, during the dumping of the load from the second truck, we had a bit of a scare.

The truck backed up very quickly, coming within 6″ of the RV. My not very excitable husband got excited and yelled at the driver to stop… just in time. I was filming at the time, so it is documented… the noise of the trucks are such that you can’t really hear my husband saying (as he walked away): “Boy, that was close!”

DH took time to teach the boys how to drive the bobcat… both of them thought it was great fun. No doubt their computer game skills helped them a great deal! We have some vids to post showing their skills… The first is of the oldest boy (13 years old), working the magic:

The next video is of the youngest boy (11 years old), at the controls of the Bobcat:

The pad has now been built up to a fairly level state, with extra space built-up around the edges to allow for porches, patios, etc. This weekend has been spent watering the pad in preparation for rolling to compress the soil further next week.