Madeline's Castle!: Moving Mountains (or small mounds of dirt)

In order to get to the point where we could fill in the pool, we needed to break up the rest of the concrete in the yard and get it in the pool. To help with this task and others, I would like to introduce you to the BX25 Kubota tractor.

We rented this guy for the week to do some of the heavy lifting we needed to do around the house. It made breaking up the cement so much easier.

For a few days it looked like our backyard exploded which was actually an improvement over what it looked like before, but once we broke up the cement into pieces and got it into the pool, the backyard started resembling a backyard.

Then, the real transformer, the fill arrived. I got a big kick out of the fill coming out of the truck so here are a few pics.

This was one of four loads (2 fill and 2 loam) that were delivered throughout the day. Then we started filling in the pool!

Look how flat! It was a bizarre feeling when we were finally able to walk in the area we once would have fallen into. This is just the fill down (notice all the small rocks) so the nice loam still needed to be spread. Before we started do that though, we used the tractor to dig the footings for the deck. While we continued to spread dirt around we also started building the deck. Nate's mom came down with Tom and my mom also came down to help construct the deck and they did so much work!!

Footings

Base beams

So we stayed at this point for a bit due to a lack of levelness. We tried a bunch of different things to make sure that when we cut the beams to the right height that the deck would be level, but the only thing that worked in the end was a 360 degree laser. Even that was difficult considering it was a bright day but it did the trick and now we are going to have a nice level deck.