All Day:
Martin scraped, moved, and spread dirt from the second third of the glacial moraine. Gary and Lani met with Garret on the property and discussed the progress of the cut. Gary and Lani made arrangements to meet again with him and Dan on Tuesday morning, August 20th, to try and begin drawing the foundation outline on the cut dirt.
Looking North across the building site
Looking Southeast across the building site
All Day:
Finally, now that the maple tree had been removed, the moraine could be leveled. Once Dan and Martin began digging into the dirt, many different kinds of dirt were found. The structure fascinated me to the point of where I have done a little web research. I have been calling the two irregular shaped hummocks on which the house is being built a glacial moraine.
Here is a rendering, created in Bryce, of the building site terrain based on an approximate 2-foot contour map we had created by Northwestern Territories, Inc, the geo-tech company that did our original site survey:
Same image annotated
As I began researching I found that there are two terms for debris left by a glacier: kame and moraine. Kames seem to be more related to melt-water deposits and moraines to the bulldozer effect of the glacier itself. It was a bit confusing, but I finally found a working definition that makes sense for this discussion:
A kame is a steep and sharp hill ridge, caused by the deposit of moraine - the gravel and boulders deposited at the end of a glacier. Moraine is sometimes deposited forming a dam rather than a hilly ridge.… The difference is that moraine describes the deposited material and a kame may result from this deposit.
However the soil got there and whatever it's called, the cutting of the moraine debris revealed several kinds of soil:
We found many rocks in the beautiful soil, mostly basalt - the volcanic bedrock of this area, but also a few erratics of Canadian granite, Cascade Jade, and compressed-ocean bottom shale:
The following video shows the removal of duff, the beginning efforts to cut down of the moraine to form a level building site, and the discovery of many rocks, including an approximately 7-ton whopper that had to be shoved and rolled off the building site. All these rocks and boulders are valuable as landscaping elements and will be put to good use before we are finished.
For those of you with additional interest in the geography of glaciers, here is a great site describing the Cairngorms region of Scotland.
All Day:
Today was another busy day. Martin continued to remove vegetation from north side of the glacial moraine. On the top of that moraine, near the southern edge, stood a majestic big leaf maple. It looked near death when we bought the property but had shown some life in recent years, mostly through suckers and offshoots sprouting around its base.
The tree was tenacious and took almost an hour of Martin digging at its roots before he was able to topple it:
The trunk was sound and of good size so Garret suggested we have a saw mill cut it up to be used in the house. Gary suggested that since the fireplace needs a mantle maybe we could build one from the tree. Garret thought this a great idea and made plans to take the tree to the mill to be sawed into a beam for the mantle and other boards for finishing parts of the house interior. Martin cut the trunk into big chunks for transport.
Harvesting The Trunk:
Dan Holds The Roots While Martin (Hidden) Saws Them Off  |
The Harvested Trunk  |
Dan Uses The Excavator To Hold The Trunk For Martin  |
Martin Makes The Cut  |
Mid Day:
Another day off with minimal work done on the project. PUD came by to install and energize the electric meter.
We'll never see this meter reading again!
Morning:
Finally another big work day on the site. Garret and Dan have been getting other commitments out of the way so they dedicate their time to this project. Dan and Martin arrived in the morning with a smaller excavator that had a shovel and a dozing blade. They filled in the side trench to the well and around the electric pedestal.
During the final fill-in of the trench around the well head, Garret discovered the filling of the well trench had inadvertently pulled on the electrical conduit causing it to shift away from the wellhead. This shift cracked and damaged the conduit where it was attached to the well head. Cory replaced the damaged conduit and repaired the electrical connection.
Filling in the well trench.
Pea Gravel To Encase The Electrical Conduit and Water Pipe  | ||
Starting To Fill  |
Broken Electrical Conduit  |
Figuring The Fix  |
Finishing It Off  | ||
Afternoon:
A true sign that the project is booming!
Bill's Sani-Kan arrives on the site:
Garret and Mark tamped the freshly filled in dirt around the pedestal and built a form for pouring a concrete slab around the base of the pedestal.
Tamping down the dirt is a dusty business. Four wheel barrow loads of concrete were just right!
