On Tuesday we hit our first problem with construction of the new house. Rather, neighbor John hit it with his bulldozer. It’s a spring at the entrance of the new driveway.
Tuesday was the first reasonably dry day in more than two weeks, so in the afternoon John began clearing again. Some time later he called (but I missed the call) to have me come down and look at how deep his dozer had sunk into the mud. Leah told me about the call, so I went down the street to see what was going on. John had moved the dozer, and there was a fairly strong spring emerging from a depression that it had made when it sank into the mushy area.
This is John driving and his helper directing. The spring is about where the pine branch is hanging down towards the drive, right across from John’s helper. John has already moved some mud to let the spring flow down to the right of the drive. The area above the spring is not too wet for work, but the driveway entrance is critical for the work to continue
I had noticed that the driveway entrance looked muddier than further up the drive. I thought it might just be surface runoff, but obviously it wasn’t.
It’s a problem, but the whole construction process is really just a series of problems that have to be solved. John is calling in someone with a backhoe to make a ditch upstream of the driveway to divert the spring into an existing ditch and then into a culvert.
He’s going to bring in some rock to make a solid surface at the driveway entrance. That will be good, because this video should give some indication of just how muddy it was.
Interesting about the spring. While it complicates things now, it certainly has potential interest as a feature if you can figure out how to – what, deploy it?
Glenn and I also chose late fall to begin our house construction, and were warned that things wouldn’t happen as fast as they would in the usual construction season. They were right – it was muddy and sticky and there were a lot of off days and postponements. On the other hand, once the foundation and some of the framing was in place, they really enjoyed not having to deal with 90-100 F temps.
I was noting your red clay, which of course we share, and is old hat to me. We hosted a colleague, in the bad 80s, from the then Soviet Union. He was utterly shocked by the red color of the soil, which he had never in his life seen. Actually another colleague from Norway, in the late 80s, was similarly affected.
Wayne — I’m pretty sure it’s a wet-weather spring. Neighbor John brought in a backhoe operator and we had a ditch cut to drain the spring. Later on I’ll see how much it flows and what we might be able to do with it.
Neighbor John told me he likes doing his work in cold weather. Of course he’s very warm natured. He was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt today, with temps in the 20s and a strong wind.
A spring is good thing in the right place! Crazy weather everywhere right now. We’re in southern CA visiting my mom, and it was 84 degrees here today. Last week the low was literally freezing. Be nice if things would settle back down into their pleasant averages!
Robin — I would love to have a perennial spring somewhere on our property. We are at about 19 F as I write this on Wednesday evening, heading down somewhere around 10 F. Leah has been worrying all day about making sure all the cats stay warm. Unfortunately, when we put some kind of shelter down in the garage for one particular cat (Dusty in this case), another cat decides to play musical chairs and takes that warm spot. In this case it’s his sister Rusty, who usually stays in our specially made cathouse or under the stoop in the garage (when Sylvester and Smokey stay inside), where Leah has put down lots of warm bedding. It’s all so confusing I’m not sure even the cats can keep it straight.