With the parts ready we were now. . . nowhere near ready to start construction. I knew there was still a lot of work to do before the first hammer would be raised. I just wanted to be sure that if we were missing any parts the company would have time to ship them to us before we actually needed them.
30 by 10 feet didn’t sound like a lot, actually it didn’t even look like a lot at first. Even after doing the math (10 yards * 3.3333 yards * .16666 yards deep = 5.6 cubic yards of dirt) the enormity of that amount of digging, hauling, and dumping dirt didn’t really strike me. It took about an hour of work and realizing that I’d only gone about 6 by 8 feet for the scale of the project to strike me as daunting.
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As our neighbors noticed the project beginning they took some interest in the spare dirt we had since they do a lot of gardening. This was incredibly fortunate for us since we didn’t really have a good place to put it, and disposing of it properly would have run about $200. So wheelbarrow by painful wheelbarrow I brought it to an ever growing pile in their front yard.
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So far they’ve used about half of it. I’m not sure what they plan to do with the rest as you can see in the picture below there’s still a fair amount there (that’s right, this in only about half of what I moved) although Molly and I are pretty sure that it’s been causing a bit of tension in their household.
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I think in total I put in about 8-10 hours of digging over the course of about a week. My wrists had never hurt so bad, I could barely lift the shovel by the time I was done. In fact, I can still feel it a bit, almost 3 weeks later. In the end though we got this. . .
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. . .a giant hole in the ground.
