Slow Progress in Waterville

The excavation for the sawmill shed is proceeding though slower than I would hope. I've run in to a layer of primarily clay and with it still being wet it is very slippery and "sucky" makes me worry about getting stuck. We also realized a couple of days ago that since we change the orientation of the shed it no longer had to be at grade with the driveway. This has helped since we don't have to cart as much soil away. I've been dividing my time between moving dirt, pulling stumps, carting away trash wood to the burn pile, and starting work on the cabin location (see cabin post from today).

Some of the stumps are a pretty good size and take an hour, or more to get out. Unfortunately there are a couple left which are larger than any I've attempted thus far. I've been spending time up at the cabin site since it is the weekend and the neighbors are home. I don't want to bother them too much. Of course if they hadn't put their doublewide right on the property line it wouldn't be that much of a problem for them. I must admit that if I was building on their property I probably would have put the house in the same place. Of course I wouldn't have hauled in a doublewide. Also, if I'm worrying about noise at this point I can't wait until the sawmill is running. Don't know which sounds worse the mill or the tractor.

Don't know if you can make it out in the picture to the left but I would say we are about 1/2 the way back in the excavation. there are still a couple of trees which need to come down. One of them quite tall. Hopefully we can have it fall where we want it. We've been waiting to take it down since it should be a good tree to mill and we don't want it lying around while we finish up the excavating and set up the mill.

I got a "builder's level" yesterday from Amazon which is basically a cheaper version of a transit. Hopefully we can get it set up and see how we are actually doing as far as grade. The site has just gotten too big to have a good clue by just looking at it.