Final Grade

Final Grade is a  beautiful phrase in the building world. This means things are done so the final dirt work can be done. For us this doesn't mean our building is done it just means that the dirt moving part of the drive is finished.

Yesterday, the dirt guy did the final grade on the hill above Bill's fantastic retaining wall. Yes, we could have done this ourselves but my goodness it would never have looked this good.

 You can see at the end of the wall is our dumpster (one more joy of country living, no city trash pick up). Each time the driver would empty our dumpster  he would call and ask us to tweak where we had the dumpster sat so he was safe picking it up in our Oklahoma winds, We  finally said level the ground we will deal with the dirt behind it when we can get a machine over to rock the wall from where it ends to behind the dumpster. We completely understand the drivers concerns, we face those daily delivering product to our customers with our dump truck and they don't understand why we can't dump  up hill in 60 mile an hour cross winds. We just hadn't taken into consideration the dumpster isn't always loaded evenly by weight.

 Now we can bury our phone line. That's it going across the drive. AT&T says our phones won't work right until the line is underground. These lines are not made to be above ground. They kept trying to come out and bury it and I had to keep calling them and saying "NO there is still dirt work going on".

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 It was really interesting watching him move the dirt. Almost everything is done in reverse. On the slop find a hole to drop your back end into pull dirt towards you and fill it in.

 Of course you have to have the guys with the shovels doing all the fine tuning and steep work. We say how much rock we still need to put onto the wall. Maybe this weekend before the storms come we can get a little bit done.

I can't wait to get wild flower seeds planted and have an incredible Butterfly and Hummingbird garden. We will see this each and every time we come home and in the spring and summer it will be absolutely gorgeous! I will need to put some native drought loving green up here so it will look good in the winter also.