Digging the Footings and Dumping the Stump

(Maybe it's me, but the title of this post sounds... odd. 'Nuff said.)

Okay, with the porch and deck out of the way and into the dumpster, the dumpster gnomes came and took it away. In its place they left... another dumpster! It is a home renovation miracle!

Our contractor got to work with his Bobcat and a rented mini-excavator and started to level the ground and work on getting the stump from the maple tree out. The number of roots was pretty amazing and they covered a very wide area. You can see some of them stacked up in the picture.

 

The stump well...errr.... stumped them for a bit. They worked at it for quite a while but it just wouldn't budge. So, another tool was rented, The ever popular stump grinder. Think of it as a circular saw with only a couple of teeth (that look like hippo molars) mounted on the front of a tracked lawn mower. It spins and wears away at the stump creating an impressive shower of saw dust.

Eventually, this wore away enough of the stump so that the excavator could pull it up out of the ground. Once the dirt was knocked free it was surprising to see how shallow the roots really were for such a big tree.

The stump was walked/pushed over to the dumpster and after a fair amount twisting, it eventually got in there.

I have to admit that as a kid, I was never a "truck" type. I don't think I ever played with bulldozer and truck type toys. Give me a tank or airplane any day. But, I have to admit now, they are really cool to watch. Crawling around doing neat stuff like digging a hole in a second and a half that would take me an hour. They really do seem alive. In a nice Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel way, not like Killdozer.

With the stump and roots out of the way, the trench for the footers and their required insulation panels went in very quickly. No surprises.

 

We kept the two pieces of slab that were already there and filled in a lot of the space with crushed concrete which apparently goes for about $7 a ton. Seriously. This allowed us to pour the slab up flush with the existing floor level of our house. Now the addition will be flush and not a "step down" when we enter it from inside the house.

The concrete pour took place and I didn't get a picture of it happening. However, here is a potential Pulitzer winning photo of what the slab looked like through my kitchen door several hours later.

The plastic trapped the moisture in and that helps with how the concrete cures. It came out great. Very smooth and level. So far so good.

The concrete subcontractor is also the masonry contractor. We needed a week and a hurricane to go by before the walls could start going up. In the meantime, the dumpster gnomes came back and worked their magic once again and left us with a replacement dumpster (that is already 1/2 full again.)

Will miracles never cease?