One of the strange (and fantastic) features of the house is the drive through garage. No, this isn't where I forget to put the car in reverse and drive through our bedroom (a deep seated fear of my husband's though I've never shown any inclination toward doing so). Our garage is split into two: a regular garage, and a little garage that has a garage door in the front and back (opening up to our backyard) so you can literally drive through into the backyard. This is fantastic for getting things into the backyard with one minor exception: they can't be any wider or taller than the garage door itself.
Things that fall into the fantastic: BBQ, large table, kayak, wood, tools, ladders, small to medium sized mammals, hammocks, etc.
Things that have a problem: Our contractor's excavator. Oh, and a ski boat named Sam, but that's another story.
The excavator, as my brilliant 4 year old nephew will tell you, is the thing that digs (Like, seriously, this kid knows all the construction equipment. I didn't even know most had specific names! I once got a lecture when he was two over the difference between a "large excavator" and a "small excavator" because I failed to call them by their size descriptive names). And while our contractor's excavator was a "small excavator", it was still too tall to drive through our garage.
Being the glass half full kind of guy, our foreman went around to the fire road access in the valley below our house and drove the excavator up the backside of the hill. Apparently with proper balance and leverage, you make it up the slope (read: If you have balls of steel, you can storm the keep. Gravity is for cowards!). Now we know where those tracks in the google maps satellite picture came from. After celebrating his success of getting the excavator into the backyard (I like to imagine a round of beers in an old wooden pub while busty bar maids in old time corsets listened wide eye to his tales of valor with his trusty steed, excavator), there was still the arduous task of actually digging.
The amount of rocks they dug up in the 25 feet of the drainage trench that was finished yesterday only confirmed my theory that the backyard in 99.2% rock. While digging the trench we also got a better look at our possible storm drain pipe in the side yard and it is much smaller than we were envisioning. I was picturing like Shawshank Redemption crawl to freedom sized pipe, not cat sized hamster tube.
Things that fall into the fantastic: BBQ, large table, kayak, wood, tools, ladders, small to medium sized mammals, hammocks, etc.
Things that have a problem: Our contractor's excavator. Oh, and a ski boat named Sam, but that's another story.
The excavator, as my brilliant 4 year old nephew will tell you, is the thing that digs (Like, seriously, this kid knows all the construction equipment. I didn't even know most had specific names! I once got a lecture when he was two over the difference between a "large excavator" and a "small excavator" because I failed to call them by their size descriptive names). And while our contractor's excavator was a "small excavator", it was still too tall to drive through our garage.
Being the glass half full kind of guy, our foreman went around to the fire road access in the valley below our house and drove the excavator up the backside of the hill. Apparently with proper balance and leverage, you make it up the slope (read: If you have balls of steel, you can storm the keep. Gravity is for cowards!). Now we know where those tracks in the google maps satellite picture came from. After celebrating his success of getting the excavator into the backyard (I like to imagine a round of beers in an old wooden pub while busty bar maids in old time corsets listened wide eye to his tales of valor with his trusty steed, excavator), there was still the arduous task of actually digging.
The amount of rocks they dug up in the 25 feet of the drainage trench that was finished yesterday only confirmed my theory that the backyard in 99.2% rock. While digging the trench we also got a better look at our possible storm drain pipe in the side yard and it is much smaller than we were envisioning. I was picturing like Shawshank Redemption crawl to freedom sized pipe, not cat sized hamster tube.
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| More kitty tubes, MORE! |
While its size is less than impressive, we did confirm its existence, and there should be no impact to construction or plans.
Status Day 2: Backyard still flat, more rocks moved, drainage trench mostly dug.
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