Spring 2013 - Renting an Excavator for Another Barn Renovation

This Spring we rented an excavator to dig the foundation footers for barn #1, which is closest to the house, and will eventually be parking for one vehicle and a tractor, along with Bob's workshop and storage.  Jacking the barn up to dig the footers was no easy feat!  We had it jacked up from the center....

... and a few days before the excavator was to be delivered, one of the jacks blew out, and the barn fell about 8 inches!  Upon falling, the barn also rotated or twisted off the foundation.  Talk about nightmare!  We called the rental company, but because they were booked up, so we could only delay the rental by a few days.  So Bob worked furiously in getting the barn back up in the air in time.  This time Bob scabbed together beams, built sill plates, and jacked the barn up from the bottom.  Sure, sounds easy, but jacking up in frost, snow, rain and mud is tedious, dirty, annoying work.  Believe me, tossing a match on the barn was contemplated numerous times!  Anyhow, we got it back up on the beams, and then using an old trick my Dad told us about, we soaped down the beams. Then Bob pushed with the bucket of the tractor from behind the barn, and from a cable that we anchored on the wall hooked to my hitch, I used my Subaru to pull the barn from the front.  Slowly but surely, we pushed/pulled that barn on an angle, and it slid right back into place on the foundation.  Of course, I didn't get any pics during this fiasco, it was just get-er-done time! 

Then it was excavator time!  You can see below that Bob is digging on the north side of the barn, where there was still a ton of frost in the ground, mid-April! 

 

A few years back, we trenched power and heat tubing out from our indoor wood boiler which heats our house.  You can see the gray conduit and orange tubing running through the footer trench below.

While digging the footers on the barn, we noticed that at about one foot depth, there was a fill layer of old trash.  You can see an old wooden barrel metal, along with other random metal junk.  We found a few old leather shoes, bottles, and lots of broken glass, pottery and rusty metal.  It felt like we were archeologists, uncovering clues into this farm's past!  The coolest thing we found was a bottle of sarsaparilla, with the cork still fully intact, and with a little sarsaparilla in it!

To get our money's worth on the excavator rental, we put hours on the machine to dig two ponds, one for my koi fish, that are living in a fish tank in my living room since we moved from the old place, and the other as a duck pond.  (I've always wanted ducks!)  I got time on the machine, and dug this pond hole all by myself!  See that big rock, I wrestled that out of the hole, and yep, rock is staying right there, it's too big to move anymore, but it makes a nice seat! 

 

The aftermath of renting an excavator is that there are holes and dirt piles everywhere, and the lawn is all torn up.