Parking Area Project – Phase II
Finally it is time for Phase II of the project. All of these damn camping trips keep getting in my way of progress!! I found ‘Backhoe Mike’ on Craigslist (found out he was right around the corner from our house) and he came over this morning to dig out the trenches for the drainage from the backyard and the ‘footers’ for the retaining block wall. If you’re looking for a guy with a small backhoe in the Frederick area drop me a line and I’ll forward on his information. I was also able to get 5 ton of gravel delivered this afternoon to start working on backfilling my drainage trenches. Here are a couple of pics of the progress..
Pic looking from the back yard over to the neighbor's house
In this picture you can see the 12×12 drainage catch basin’s that will be installed in the ground. I will be incorporating the gutter on the left of the picture into the first basin and then the second will be at the back center of the parking area.
The 'footer' for the retaining wall...
Mike and I were very surprised that we didn’t hit any large tree roots being so close to the 80 foot trees around the parking area. Good thing we didn’t because I was sick and tired of changing my plan up to this point!
Shot from the bottom of the driveway
Here is a good picture looking up the driveway from the road. Shows the ‘new’ fence location and another massive tree that we had to ‘build’ around for the parking area.
Bottom side of the retaining wall 'footer'.. The rounded area
For people that know me, I can’t do anything ‘easy’ so I had to incorporate an arced section to the retaining wall. At the farthest edge of the wall I’m going to be putting in a 30amp plug for our trailer and a lamp post to give general light to the area.
The main trench for the drainage from the back yard
This will be the ‘evacuation route’ for all of the water from the back yard that is currently running into the neighbor’s yard and creating a massive river (and erosion) when we get downpours. I also had a ‘leach bed’ (for lack of better terms) dug right where I was standing when I took this picture to make sure that we didn’t have a massive erosion issue now in our own yard.
