Digging for Daylight

Rough excavation, a woodshed, and a bonfire celebration.

My oh my- nothing lights a fire under one’s ass quite like enduring 15 months of not knowing whether you will get to move forward with a dream project; let alone a project that will finally rectify your living situation. After 2 weeks straight of racing (and 4-wheeling) around the property we were ecstatic to contact an excavator in hopes they would take on the job of moving enough earth around to create our daylight basement. Of course, Brian considered buying his own, but the price was a little steep, and I argued it probably had more of a learning curve than “playing a video game” as some people say (Brian! Insert eye roll here). Also, it was not like we were cutting a normal rectangle into some boring flat piece of land. We needed someone skilled and experienced to cut into our hillside and create a multi-stepped piece of art that would become the most interesting foundation pour that no YouTube channel would ever prepare me for. Enter, Ken’s Bulldozing. Fun fact, Ken had helped Dan (Brian’s dad, owner of current property) resurface the driveway a few years back. We gave our future comrades (Ken and his son, Jasper) a call and scheduled them straight away, as they were very sought-after dudes.

Queue the record scratch... you know where music is playing consistently, all things are hunky dory and then! ErrrrrrrRRRRRR. Nothing. Radio silence. Well, that is what happened to our project when none other than Covid-19 reared its ugliest head. All residential construction was stopped and prohibited by state law. Companies in Snohomish county were actively getting fined for doing ANY work whatsoever that would count as residential. In fact, we were extremely lucky to even get this far because all our permits were approved the last day the country was open before they were forced to go into lock down. Whew.

So, what does one do with all this time, especially when they have precisely a shitload of wood and nowhere to put it? That’s right. We decided to build a woodshed! Dan came up with a 12’ tall 8 X 24’ aerated woodshed design that Dan, Brian, Jordan (our best friend and serf) and I all helped to bring to life. One cool thing about Dan keeping stuff around for decades is that we were able to reuse 2 pressure treated posts from Brian’s old batting cage (1992) and 2 2’ X 8’s from Brian’s old sandbox (1986) that were still in great shape! Splitting and shoving wood into that thing still continues every free second we have to this day.

After three more weeks of waiting, our earth moving masters were finally able to come out to get started on the rough excavation. They spent about 1 week “grubbing.” This is a term that refers to removing stumps, cleaning up brush, moving boulders, and generally clearing the land so that it is ready for the main work of cutting the hillside. Fun fact; one of the maple stumps was so large and heavy, they had to leave it overnight to dry out before they could move it with their bigger excavator!

To celebrate this first phase of our excavation completion, Brian, Jordan and I had a gigantic bonfire with all the debris. Side note, it was quite a job to get the whole thing to burn due to all the dirt that was embedded throughout the piles of debris. It took almost an entire day of feeding it and moving it around and pickaxing enough areas to get it to really catch. (Don’t worry, our location for this was in a damp spot at the bottom of the valley away from neighboring brush of course.) It was such a day’s worth of work we felt it necessary to roast wieners to go with our Pub Beers at the end of the night, on 12-foot-long skewers since the fire was so hot. Ha! Of course Rocky and Sundance joined the party.

The next day, Jordan and Brian did some layout for Ken to cut the hillside by staking the corners of the house and spray painting lines on the ground (details of layout will be in one of Brian’s Nitty Gritty posts later).

Ken was then able to return for the rough cut of the hillside, and wow, what a mess he made. In the best way that excavators do, of course! The massive pit that would eventually be our daylight basement was dug down to 9 feet deep in the back/west side, with multiple other steps of varying heights to complete the rough excavation. To help bring the lot to grade, Brian busted out his fancy laser (that almost caused Bri a hemorrhage after finding out the cost of such an item) and was able to determine the depths at which Ken should cut to.

All in all, the total dirt that was moved out of the pit was around 900 yards of dirt. We think this is hilarious because original estimation of dirt removal was 280 yards. I reminisce about these couple weeks of excavating as a nice break from the crazy marathon of wood hauling and chopping, and how great it was to have someone else do the work for a spell... But still no way in heck I was ready to hire anything else out. Nope. Not me. Not us...Little did I know what was in store for the next round of manual work that was required after the rest of the layout process was done. Stay tuned!