Stone for the Poop Tomb – The House series
Yes, I will be continuing the story from where I left off last time, but for now I’m breaking in with our #CurrentHappenings. (The rest of The House series can be found HERE.)
The Septic
Did I tell you about how we found the old septic? Which happens to be situated under where we want to put the deck… No? That will have to be a story for another time. Needless to say, it is very old… and iffy about where it goes and for how long it will drain.
The weather this summer was wet. Rain was evenly spaced out about every week or so… perfect for growing – and mowing – your very green grass every week all the way through October!
Not so perfect for putting in a septic system.
We had thought we’d have to delay this BIG project until the spring, but the last several weeks we’ve been blessed with sunny and still-pretty-warm (for Minnesota) weather, and so we’re back to plan A and getting the septic in before winter!
We had to clear a HUGE space in the middle of the grove behind the house for the iconic mound, aka “poop tomb,” as I call it. Technically it’s the “drain field.” Once you start looking for these long rectangle humps, you can’t un-see them in so many yards of rural places out in the country (sometimes right in the front, first thing you see – yikes!).
The drain field area will then have layers of rock and dirt on top. So Ben ordered some loads of stone…
How much do you think a (cubic) yard of small rock weighs? Put your guess in the comments along with your reaction to how close you were {I thought I was close, but I was WAAAAAY off!}, and keep reading for the answer!
This (below) is the entrance where the big trucks will drive in, and later we will used this cleared space for a shed.
The same space, a few days later! The big tree that is directly behind Ben is the same one you can see almost centered, below.
Looking from the cleared entrance (click on photo for panorama):
And then the rock arrived.
How much do you think this whole pile weighs? Hint: It is 15 yards (3’x3’x3′) of small stones. Hint #2: It was $25/yard (they call it a “yard” but it’s actually a CUBIC yard – a yard is just slightly shorter than a metre for my international readers)!
It doesn’t look like *that* much, but that is ONE DUMP TRUCK LOAD of rock right there!
I guessed that one cubic yard of this rock would weigh oh… definitely a lot, so like half a ton, or 1,000 pounds (454kg). The correct answer: 1.4 tons or 2,800 lbs!!! (1.27 tonnes or 1,270 kg)
So that load the dump truck was hauling? 21 tons or 42,000 lbs! (19 tonnes or 19,051 kg) I was trying to give myself a more tangible way to understand that number, and tried picturing how many people it would take to fill the back of the truck… {nope! Can’t do math that high. Bad idea. It would be a lot.} No wonder it has all those wheels! It also left DEEP 6″ ruts everywhere {which I grandly bottomed out on in our little car – oops, sometimes I forget I’m not driving a truck :P}.
Hope you enjoyed this fall 2016 update! We also moved a shed to our property so we will have an outbuilding, so a write-up on that will be coming too! There’s snow on the forecast for Friday, and a LOT more still to be done for this crazy septic. Back to the bonfire burning brush I go…
