16 September 2019
A very busy day!!!! Tammy arrived shortly after 8:30, followed
soon thereafter by Nate and Jake Grandfield, another of her strong-backs. After getting two rocks laid for the terminus
of the wall on the south side of the driveway, Tammy left for a meeting in
Brandon. Nate and Jake used that hiatus
to mow Kate’s and Marty & Merry’s lawns, for which Goshen Mountain
Landscaping has standing lawn care contracts.
I chalk-marked the slate front walkway, then took a picture of the
layout so that we can reassemble it once a proper underlayment has been put
in. Nate and Jake removed the slate,
whereupon I excavated three Kubota bucket loads of dirt and a thin layer of stone
dust from the walkway. Nate fetched a
yard of ¾″ crushed stone with Tammy’s dump trailer, a portion of which was
compacted into the walkway hole. That
stone base was covered with filter fabric, then a full inch of stone dust. A few minutes after Tammy’s return, Bob
Laporte arrived with his super-sized backhoe.
He quickly moved the monster cornerstone rock and it’s siblings out of
the way of the significant depression that existed on the northeast corner of
the driveway. I then drove Bob back to
his place (a mile down the road) to fetch his dump truck and 7 yards of bank
run gravel, which was deposited into said depression. Under Tammy’s direction, Bob used his backhoe
to reposition the five huge rocks that there was no way our Kubotas would ever
move. Just before he departed, Bob
pulled a bunch of good wall building rocks out of the woods on the north side
of the driveway, as they were beyond the reach of our Kubotas and too big to
retrieve by hand. Is it lunch time
yet? After inhaling some sustenance, we
spent the afternoon laying the base rocks for the stone wall on the south side
of the driveway, getting 30 feet (about half that distance) done by quitting
time. Chree arrived home from a week’s
journey in the midst of that work. When
she toured the build site after Tammy and the guys had left, Chree had some
concerns about how the wall would look when complete…
