Update #4 A Man and His Dozer

A man and his dozer. 
It's a very personal thing.

Perry on the dozer making me nervous once again.

The end of June 2013 found us breaking ground or to be more exactly, we were moving it. Tons and tons of it.

 Mr. Engineer-Husband estimated it to be 3,300 cubic yards of d-i-r-t.

Yep. That's alot of dirt.

The house site had been marked early on and surveyed. (surveyed by Perry and Junior. Perry is also a a Mr. Surveyor-Husband.) We were anxious to get it all dug out and ready to build on.

We were moving, and excavating and pushing and scraping and shoving and you name it, Perry and the dozer or the excavator did it.

1st day moving house dirt

I would sit for hours and watch him. It's a good thing I did! There were a few times when I though for sure I would be calling 911 or at least attempting to send up smoke signals to brother in law Scott, who happens lives across the valley. Don't get me wrong, Mr Engineer-Husband is a master of driving  equipment, excuse me, OPERATING of equipment, but he was doing some heavy equipment acrobats that made me nervous.

All in all....he was never hurt and neither were any farm animals. It's all good!

Blazing a trail

Some days he would get tired of digging the basement and he'd work on the driveway to the garage or the main road up to the house site.

 Day in and day out he dug and shoved.

Bob the Builder ain't got nuthin' on Perry.

Working on the driveway

Putting in the driveway to the garage

Every day I was home (and not out doing ghost hunts or scouting new cemeteries)

 I would drive up and watch him work. Some days I took the ghost mobile but mostly drove the ol' John Deere Gator up there. 

The Ghost Mobile

My old faithful Gator- notice gravel on the driveway? :-)

The road to the house site was looking better and better with all the work Perry was doing.

 It was still dirt, but gravel would come soon, I was told. 

One more load of rocks up the hillside and then there would be no more.

Perry informed me that once the big hole for the basement was completely dug, no big trucks could take rocks up there and put them in the front yard as they had been doing.

Ok. Enough about rocks. The first day of digging had arrived.

.  

The Saturday night before the first dirt was dug, I had led an all night ghosthunt at the West Virginia Pen and was decked out in black like a Swat Team member gone rogue. The next day I was at the house site ready to see some earth moved and dressed up like farmer Joe. 

Except for these atrocious hot pink clown boots I would wear. Thanks, mom.

I love them.

 It was a far cry from the all black ghosthunt attire from the night before. 

(and a lot less cool looking)

But,we were both excited and ready for the event.

Perry worked non stop. From the last day of July through September 1st he was a little worker ant. (bee?)

 Every day after he finished his day job, would start up the excavator and dig.

 In the rain, in the heat of late summer and at night in the dark. I tried to be there as much as possible. I ran him up some water, some diet Coke and even a few dinners we ate up there out of a pizza box. (I wish we had pizza delivery here!)

 If I had a ghost hunt or haunted tour to run, he sometimes did it with me or stayed and worked pushing or digging dirt. That's when I worried about him the most. His brother Scott would check on him or his nephew Jack as they live about a mile away. 

PROGRESS!!

It was good to see the progress from down below. You can make out the new road and all those boulders that were placed in the front yard of the new house. Yeahhh!!

On one of those wonderful hot days when I was watching Perry work, I decided I was hungry and wanted to signal to Perry that I wanted to have lunch.

SO....I waved at him a few times and mouthed the word "lunch"  and shouted it and he pointed to his ears signalling he couldn't hear me. 

 I was sitting on the gator and was starved. I wanted lunch. I simply thought if I made the letter "L" with my hand, he would figure that lunch needed to happen.

For 20 minutes that day, I kept making the "L" sign at him while he operated the dozer. He would frown and keep on dozing. 

This went on and on for awhile until he finally shut the machine off and yelled at me "Why do you keep calling me a loser?"

Ummm. 

I did not realize there is a universal sign language of sorts (apparently) for machine operators and what I was doing was definitely not the Lunch signal.

Whoops.

It was a quiet lunch.

So the grading and the digging of our basement continued for over a month.

We sweated, and moved rocks and moved dirt until most night we dropped from exhaustion. Dirt was a 4 letter word.

But we were making headway!

July 2103

August 2013

Perry worked on a small access road around the front of the house as well. You can see my "little" rocks all piled up. It will be awhile before I can put them where I want them but I was content to daydream. 

Some night after Perry was done working he's complain of being beat to death by the equipment. After watching this video, I could understand why he was so sore.

The weeks went by. He worked. I gathered rocks and paint samples. I shopped for lighting fixtures. I know. I was waaaayyy ahead of myself.

Then it happened. 

We were all done with the basement digging!

 Finally. Woohooo!

Perry knew that there was clay in the soil where we would be digging.

Remember? He's Mr. Engineer-Surveyor-Husband.

 He is always thinking of creative ways to save money. We are selling the clay from the house site to a company in North Carolina who is making bricks out of it. Pretty cool, eh?

A handful of clay from the basement

You can see where the clay is at by looking at this photo. See the top layer?

That's the clay.

End of August 2013

Surveying the corners needed to be done and measurements set in "stone" for the basement foundation.

I was glad Perry had successfully dug the dirt and not one single call to 911 

The sunsets were a wonderful way to end the long days.

I couldn't wait till we could see this from the front porch and share it with family and friends.

Finally, it was time to get some good help. Perry got a great team to do the foundation work for us. Andy came on to the project and brought James with him to do the footers, lay the block and pour the concrete foundation. 

What a great team they are and hard workers! 

They have become our good friends as well.

The footers were formed and poured the 1st week of September 2013 and 24 yards of concrete was delivered. Did I tell you how HOT it was in September? It was a very warm month...good for house building but not for hot, back breaking, concrete work.

The first load of concrete had arrived and I was thrilled. No more mud in that area!

After the 30 inch wide footers were poured we would start the basement walls.

(of course he made the footers BIGGER than he had to) 

With over 4000 cinder blocks to be laid in the foundation basement, we were glad to NOT have to do this part of the work. I'm delicate, you know. AND I hit 50 in September. Oh.My.Aching.Back.

1st yard of concrete ready to pour!

The month of September ended.

 63 yards of concrete poured that month

 27 pallets of 12 inch cinder block delivered

1600 feet of water line and electrical line dug by Perry

and 1 nasty accident on site.

James met up with a big boo - boo.

He had a little accident with the Bobcat and his leg. 

(the Bobcat machine, not the Bobcat animal)

We had multiple issues with equipment breakdowns and now James would be off work and almost lost his leg! 

I know we have had some paranormal "issues" at out house on the property but what was going on here at the new house site?

Was the house site cursed?

Update #3 Roads and Rocks

Are we done yet?

I was still waiting for everything to happen. Shoot, I was already picking out our paint colors and carpet. And the basement wasn't even dug yet. I was impatient, I will admit.

Perry assured me all in good time.
We had rocks to move and roads to build and a mining strip job site to reclaim.
And oh, boy, was there a lot of work to be done. About 50 acres needed to be worked on and "put back".

Part of the reclamation of the mine site that needed to be done

You should have seen what a mess this was when it rained!

This sloped area had been nicely graded from the ugly looking contour it was after the mining occurred. All it needed was some grass and a few trees. The deer loved to graze here now.

The one product (other than the coal) to come out of the property were lots and lots of rocks. Not just little rocks but rocks that were as big as vehicles. BOULDER galore and I was in Heaven! You see, in the Buckeye State I had to pay for rock. Yes, I know! Right? Here I had more than I could handle. I asked for truck load after truck load to be taken to the house site for use in landscaping. No way, no how was I ever gonna pay $$ for rocks again. You have heard of tree huggers? I hug rocks!

Little by little the road to the house site was improved and worked upon. It was graded and widening and graded again. Road plastic was laid down and gravel was put on part of the road.

                           In the middle stage of road work on this section

Prior to the big bull dozing event that was to take place for the basement,  we had to make a nice road to get us up there. We also had to put in a secondary access road. SO much dirt to move!

This is part of our driveway that leads up to the house site.It looked nice until the mining made a bit of a mess. Now we had to start fixing it or "reclaiming" it in mining terms. Like this area below.

Everything had to be smoothed over and fixed and it seemed ta take f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

 Grades had to be done to strict specifications and grass had to be planted.

Actually, it was sprayed on from a truck. I was afraid we would have to hand seed it. NOT! WOW!

This hill side being sprayed by brother in law, Scott.

Pretty cool, eh?

They worked and worked and moved dirt and moved rock.

Rocks? Did you know I have a love affair with rocks? I know...I mentioned that earleir.

 I blame my dad. 

He had me steal river rocks, errr...take rocks for his "little"  pond project way back when. 

I know what a pound of rocks cost in Ohio at a nursery! 

He is my role model when it comes to landscaping.

Anyway, as the work was being done, I asked them to once again, hold me back a few of the boulders. 

Hey, I'm from Ohio remember and rocks are pretty expensive when you HAVE to buy them. 

I wanted lots and lots of them saved.

 It was my mission to save them and use them in my weird landscaping way in the future.

Perry was good natured and saved me a bunch of boulders.

 So did Delmas and the other guys who worked the job. I am sure they thought I was a crazy lady but I'd be damned if I had to go to Ohio and buy rock for this house!

My little pile of rocks began to grow.

And grow....

and grow and grow.

I had some many rocks at the proposed house site that a secondary pile was started down below. 

I was in rock heaven.

They even put in a Sherri Henge for me in one field!
Wohooo!

Things were progressing. 

We also had figured out where we wanted the house to sit and what view we wanted to have.

We knew we wanted a western view from the prow, or front point of the house, and we knew that we would have a warp around deck. Every view would be nice but this one, the western view, mattered the most.
When we measured and taped the house site, is was in 2011.
We were married in 2009 so you can see what kind of a pace we are moving at here!

We had already measured the house perimeters and one nice warm spring day, went went up there with several rolls of orange tape and some stakes. We walked and measured and tied tape to show us the boundaries of where we wanted  the house to be.

 It looked small to me and I made the mistake of voicing my thoughts.

 "It looks so small" to which Perry huffed "Are you out of your mind?"

I learned to not think out loud.

Stay tuned for the next update!

Update #2 Hurry up and wait.

I was getting a wee bit impatient.

 I was under the assumption that "let's build a house" said in 2009, meant let's start tomorrow. Or at least that year. Or maybe the following spring? Summer maybe? I was wrong.

There were a few things that needed to happen. Something had to GO away.

They were black, chunky, dirty and there was a lot of them. Coal.

 We had coal seams on the property and it was being mined. And mined. And mined. The property had been mined back in the 1950s and then on and on through the decades. It was now being wrapped up with a large gob (junky coal) being taken from the property and then the last of the coal had to be taken. The gob pile alone was 150,000 tons worth when it was removed.

The good coal would be stripped and also augered out.
 ( Sherri's explanation-a big drill screwed into a mountain horizontally)

Gee, I though, how long would that take?? A month, maybe three?

 All I knew was the sooner it happened, the better! Then we could get down to the fun stuff. Building a house. I will admit it was kind of fun to see all the equipment come up the driveway and everything that was going on was new to me.

Even the kids like it because after hours they could pose next to the equipment.

Liz and Sage in 2010

Back to the mining...
 I had lived in Ohio in a housing development with 300 other homes before I moved south to the land of coal mines. I'd not seen action like this and it was neat to see it happen. At least for the first 2 years. Then it got a little old.

Let me give you an example. I was baking cookies one cold, winter day in 2011 and there was a knock at the door. One of the strip job workers said "You've got to leave ma'am. They are going to put off some charges. You have about 5 minutes".

Say what?

 I come to find out "charges" is a nice word for explosion. What about my cookies? Do I take them out of the oven? Do I need to take the cats with me? Do I pack for a night? I was clueless.

This is what took place after I left my cookies in the oven.

And then there was this time when I got the knock at my door and was told I had 10 minutes to leave. By this time I knew what to do. I knew I had 10 minutes before I would hear "Fire in the Hole" over everyone's CB's and radios and a big BANG would happen. I would be allowed back to the house after about 30 minutes of waiting. Ho hummm....old hat to me by now.

But wait. As I started out the front door, I saw a man walking toward the house with a boxy looking machine with wires hanging off of it. I asked him what it was and he told me it was like a Geiger counter that would measure the strength of the explosion. Great, I thought. Should have packed up the cats or at least grabbed some fragile artifacts off the walls.

When I got the "all clear" to come back, I pulled up and looked at the house. What? Why were there some rocks on my front porch? And is that a couple of rocks up on the front of the roof? WTF? Was this an explosion gone wild?  I called my Engineer Husband who called his brother Scott who happened to be head of the strip operations. Scott chuckled and then we found out that Scott had placed the rocks there to mess with me. Nice going,Scotty!

The seasons came and went.

A good indicator of this were the "welcome" signs on our driveway. They never changed. Ambulance Entrance? Danger- Moving Equipment? What did it mean. Yep. We were still mining.

2009 and then.....

2010 and then....

2011....and then....

You get the picture?

Still mining!

The signs stayed up as we were still technically an active mining site.

Finally! The day arrived and there was no more coal. Thank you.

The last truck was going to leave with the last bit of coal. Oh, Happy Day!

The road could finally be reconstructed up to our proposed house site and we could get going!

How long would a road take to put in? A few days, right?

Or at least that was what I thought.