The local bobcat guy came around today and turned two truck loads of road base into a wafer thin covering. Where does all the material go? I was on laser-level duties, which is about the heaviest machinery I should be trusted with.
We got the pad levelled really nicely and then I had to make a final decision on where the shed will actually go. Because I've moved the earth bank back a bit, it has given me some options. I decided to do something that doesn't initially seem to make sense, and it might possibly be something I'll regret later, but I have moved the slab location further into the space I created with the recent earth works.
The shed has 4 x 4m bays. Two bays will have doors and the other two bays are facing up to an earth bank. By moving the whole shed "uphill", I will be preventing a straight entrance into the whole of the second garage door (in other words, nearly one metre of the second door will be directly facing the bank. If I can't fit a 1.8m wide car into a 4m wide door on a slight angle, at that point I should hand in my license.
By moving the shed slightly, I will be moving more of the columns into solid rock, with only a couple then having to be dug way down through fill (which has been compacted since being cut nearly a decade ago).
If I hate not having straight entry into the second garage door, I'll get the excavator around again later to move back the rock retaining wall a metre. Not a big deal, but not something I'd really thought about.
What I also hadn't thought about is how long it takes to mark out a slab and where the holes will be dug. I could have spent all day messing around with this. Spend the time to get a perfect angle, then decide I wanted to move the shed a foot to the side. Start again. Get another angle perfect then double check it with a hopelessly inaccurate free compass app on my phone and freak myself out that it is not right. Start again. Measure the parallel lines at various intervals. Measure the diagonal. Change my mind again about the shed location and START AGAIN!!! I can only blame myself.
On this photo you can just see the orange hole marking each 4 metres, with the 8m mark just the other side of the rock wall.
Here are the next two bays for the other 8m length, going back 10m. I'm going to have a mezzanine these exact dimensions, so I have 80 square metres upstairs to store junk and leave downstairs for tinkering.
Now I need to find someone with a 450 auger and the ability to cut through a bit of rock....before Saturday. Any Gold Coast guys with connections to someone with a decent weight bobcat or excavator and a rock auger?
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