5500 lb. skid-loader getting craned inside of foundation.

June 5, 1996

I rented a skid loader to level the lime waste fill inside of the foundation. There was no way to drive the skid loader inside of the foundation so I hired a crane to drop the skid loader in. The crane rents for $115/hr and showed up promptly at 8am, unfortunately my skid loader operator was not there. I didn't want to spend $115/hr waiting for him to arrive so I decided to drive the skid loader off the trailer and over to the crane. I have never operated a skid-loader but how hard could it be? It turned out that it's pretty easy to operate but it clearly takes a lot of practice before you would get efficient at doing any work with it. I learned a couple things from this: 1) If you want to save some money and time, sometimes you have to step in and do it yourself and 2) just because you can drive a car to the grocery store doesn't mean your a qualified NASCAR driver.

At 9:00am the skid-loader operator arrived and started leveling the fill inside the foundation. At the same time the trucking company started dumping more fill up above. The trucks are too heavy to dump the fill directly inside the foundation without damaging the foundation walls so we had another skid-loader (Bobcat) up top pushing the fill into the foundation.

The skid-loader operator had brought his son Derick along to level the fill in the cold storage room by hand. I spent my time helping him. At one point while we were sweating in the sun with our shovels Derick asked "are you working for Bunde Construction"? I explained that I was the owner of this home. His eyes opened wide and commented "you country boys sure are different from city folks. I don't know many owners that are willing to do this kind of work on their own home." I took this as a compliment even though I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I married a farmer's daughter though, so maybe this country thing is rubbing off.

When the fill was leveled inside it was time to call the crane operator again to get the skid loader out. That's when the two skid-loader operators put their heads together and came up with a plan to build a 4ft. ramp with fill outside the patio door and drive the skid-loader out. The patio door opening is 5'11" and the skid-loader is 5' wide so this made me a little nervous, but hey, no guts no glory. Once enough fill was dumped outside the patio door to make a ramp the operator approached the door at an angle and drove it out onto the ramp. Immediately the skid loader started to sink in the fill and tip towards the foundation, but the operator coolly started spinning the opposite set of wheels to counteract the tilt. When it stabilized he drove it down and out and saved me another $115 crane bill. I learned from this that it pays to heed the advice of your sub contractors.

Since we got a start on bringing the grade up 4' in the back of the house, I had the trucking company finish up the job with dirt. It turns out that the Bobcat operator outside of the foundation was the owner of the trucking company. So I took advantage of this and asked him to grade and rough rock (2" gravel) the driveway.

It was a very productive day, the only downside to all this is that many of the things that were done to complete the job of grading was unaccounted for in my budget (i.e. using a crane, two skid loaders, 200tons of fill inside, and perhaps 100 tons of dirt outside the foundation). I clearly underestimated the difficulties caused by building on a steep slope. Fortunately, I added 5% in my budget for cost overruns however, spending this much extra in the early stages of construction causes me some concern as to whether 5% will be enough to cover all the budget excess.

Onto the plumbing!

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