Down in a Hole

Excavation, Digging, Footing prep

Queue Alice in Chains now. No less than 4 people on different days immediately burst into this ballad upon beholding what will forever be known as “THE PIT.” My last post was called, “Would you Rather,” and alluded to the fact that I personally prefer the work on this project that involves sheer grit and brute strength (because you don’t get big guns by staring at a plumb bob). Therefore, I find the physical labor the lesser of two evils, then again, that grass is always so much greener on the other side of the pasture, isn’t it?

Just look at those beautiful batterboards across the pasture!

Okay so now why were we down in a hole? The fine excavation went as the name implies, but you see, due to the unique design of the house thanks to someone *cough* (BRIAN), we had a lot of different elevations we were working with that required cutting steps for some of the footings. The excavator would make the initial cut but was not quite able to fine-tune the dimensions required without knocking more soil into the cut where our footing would be poured. No problem we said, we will just hand dig a few spots and we will be set to finally start thinking about concrete!

Thinking of concrete got us excited, since we would finally be BUILDING something. We grabbed a couple shovels and figured it would take us a couple days’ worth of work to get our dimensions, since we knew the ground was super firm. All we needed to do was shave 2-3 inches of dirt away from the 4’ x 60’ rough cut that the excavator had made. No big deal, right? We started in the master bedroom where the excavator could not quite reach from THE PIT.

A few shovel-fulls in, Brian asked me to go get the grub hoe. He swings and gets a few more inches of dirt removed. He swings a few more times, and then sparks fly as he drops the grub hoe and shakes out his hands wincing. What. The... I grab the grub hoe and swing, and all I can say is that it was like a scene straight out of Looney Tunes where one strike of an object sends a shockwave through the entire body and stars circle your head. “Call in the reinforcements," I said, "Preferably the ones that have muscles and that love a good suffering.”

Matt and Jordan arrived at the scene, eager for their free workout. We decided to go in shifts between pick axing, grub hoeing, and shoveling out the soil. After taking 3 hours to dig a single yard of dirt, we were desperately looking into other tools that could get this job done. We decided on a rotohammer from Harbor Freight. It was a couple hundred bucks, but the already developing neuropathy in my hands was telling me it would be worth it. (And so would that 1 year warranty as we would soon see)! Our shifts turned into rotohammering, shoveling, raking. Then as our sweat poured in the hot sun, rotohammering, shoveling, raking, White Claw-ing. We might have started singing songs like we were a prison road crew, with mouths, eyes, and noses filled with sandy particulate. I usually praise the sun, but man, I would settle for a gray old Washington day during this type of work.

The weekend came and went, our reinforcements went back to their lives, and Brian and I dug on. However, one night, typical Washington weather rolled in and boy did it unload. Upon viewing THE PIT after this torrential downpour, we had the start of a small swimming pool where our daylight basement was intended. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. So, on that gray old Washington day, to add insult to injury we now had to dig to drain the entire basement pool. Jordan faithfully showed again, singing on queue, “Down in a hole, feelin' so small, Down in a hole, losin' my soul...”

Shortly after trenching out THE PIT, we proceeded to fry the rotohammer. Good thing we had bought that warranty. We would eventually kill the rotohammer two more times before the completion of just our footings!

Our muscles ached, our joints screamed, and our hands definitely now had full neuropathy. But now that the digging was behind us, or so we thought, we could finally get to the fun stuff like starting our foundation! Yes, this is obvious foreshadowing.

Stay tuned. Next up...Concrete forming for footings!

Smiling because I gained energy from the freshly consumed White Claw in my hand