Workshop Project Page 2

I tried for about 3 hours with this little gem, the teramite and it just didn't have the power to do what was needed for the site leveling. This was bad. I had to get this part done ASAP because the contractors were coming on Thursday to start their work. So I called the hardware store and they informed me that a "skidster loader" (Bobcat) was going to be best for what I had to do. Well I had never operated one before but had no time to worry about that. Bring it over please!

Luckily they got it there rather quickly. It was a beautiful little thing. A down right dirt animal! That thing could dig like crazy... so it was perfect. It took me about 2 hours to get the hang of it and really start going fast... then (of course) tragedy struck! I was suddenly covered in a shower of something. I thought at first it was condensation from the top of the cab that was blowing down on me. However during my next load of dirt I saw what it really was. The damn thing had sprung a hydraulic leak! Oh you have GOT to be kidding me!!?!???!?!? Ahhhhhh! So now here I was, 2 hours into this and again I was stuck. So I called the hardware store and had to leave a message. Luckily I had the teramite still so I was able to remove the dirt that I had piled up while I was waiting for a call back. 2 hours later the replacement finally arrived. It was not as nice as the first one but as long as it did what it was supposed to do, I was fine with it.

My wife ran the teramite to help remove dirt while I was whirring around in the site leveling things out. The big nasty tires on the loader were terrible for the grass so after ripping up my yard a bit I decided to stay in the "sandbox" as much as I could and let my wife ferry the dirt back to the garden. -Yes I had to use my garden as the dumping ground for all of this topsoil. I had nowhere else to go with it and was running out of time. So do you think I have enough topsoil on my garden now? :lol: That's the big pile you see in the background! -WAY more dirt then I ever dreamed. I had about 1 foot of topsoil to remove to get down to the subsoil. I was told to make sure I got rid of the topsoil so I did just that. Later when the contractor came, they were like ...."OHHHH NO you didn't need to remove that much dirt." They said I should have just scraped the sod off and made it as level as possible. Oh freakin well!!! It's done now.

But then I find out that it's going to cost me an extra thousand dollars for 4 loads of a special type of stone (not 4b) to fill back in. This pissed me off a bit since I ended up doing more work and in the long run costing myself more money?! Freakin A! The good news here is that now From what I hear, the more compact stone you have the better. So maybe it wasn't such a mistake afterall?