Ok, so the week started out sunday night with me taking back the machine after we finished the wall.
Here is the concept. We are building a stone wall, the green scribble. Then we are gonna build a little deck/walkway over the top to cover it. The stone wall will hold the grade and the barn foundation stones. The walkway will provide us access to check on the pigs, add bedding, give them feed, and hand the out of pen for vet to check as babies all without having to get in the pen. The floor is also gonna slope slightly toward the cow shed, the left on drawing, to get any pee or other liquids to flow away from the bedding area helping keep it clean.
A pic of the barn with the old rotten corn crib removed. The new roof for over the pig pens will tie into the old barn roof right above where the existing barn wall is. The walkway will be approx. 4'-5' wide.
Picture of the future pen area. That is Steven in the pic, he is the co-owner of the pigs. And that is my daughter standing by the excavator Supervising the work and making sure no one is goofing off or doing the wrong thing.
The excavator belongs to a gentleman who does snow removal with me as a subcontractor. His company name is T&N Excavating. He is a great guy, does excellent work, and I want to say thank you to him for letting me use his machine!! If you ever need excavating done in the Canton, Alliance, or surrounding areas of Ohio, look him up and give him a call.
Another angle to see the start of the wall. We were not really concerned with the look of this wall only its functionality. I need it to be strong and hold the grade without failing as we will not be able to access to fix once the pens are built without a lot of extra work.
We are getting close to done here. As you can see Lisa is inspecting the work as Stevens brother Josh is waiting for her approval!
We are finished building the wall here. We built the wall till we reached the grade of the existing barn floor. We then covered the entire soil area above the wall with 6"-12" of rock. It was a mix of very large to very small pieces. This will keep animals such as rats and ground hogs from digging in there to make a home. They will not be able to move the big ones and the little ones will fall done and block them if they try to dig in between.
Pic from the front.
The new roof will be built a foot or so above the existing cow shed roof. This will hopefully give me enough room to get my tractor or a stock trailer in the alley to clean, load, and unload animals. Eventually I plan on taking down the corn crib/shed that is behind where I am standing to take this picture. This will give me a large parking and work area in front of the barns. Some day in the distant future I would like to build a workshop/shed somewhere down in the area to work on the equipment inside as well as store stuff for the winter, including feed items for the animals.
After this was done I went over to Steven's place to clean a stream bed out to unplug a culvert pipe then took the machine back. I got done and home to bed and had a decent nights sleep.
I got called in to do Ice Control at 5:30am. Was out for a few hours and came home till 3pm. That was when the snow started. The snow, which was supposed to total two inches, didn't stop till 1am. By that time we had an average of 7.5" on the ground. I was up from Monday morning till Tuesday at noon.
What you are looking at above is a picture of what happens when you think you are clearing the parking lot and are actually cutting back the day lillies! The property I was on was not staked and I usually don't plow here. The previous snows had melted and I couldn't see where they had plowed before and I thought the lot went in a nice smooth curve...it didn't. I neatly trimmed off all the daylillies at the crown and removed all the excess mulch.
And before you ask me "Why didn't you see it before you went that far....here is my point of view.
You cannot see the plow from the drivers seat. You have a marker stick on each end and you have to have a sixth sense of where it is at. And when you have 5500lbs of salt in the spreader on the back of a 7500lb truck you don't feel it when you hit anything softer than concrete or large stones! I noticed the damage after I got out to shovel off the sidewalk.
We then had to haul some snow off one of our downtown accounts so I was back out at midnight. Sales call after that. Got home at about 1pm. Passed out on the couch and basically went into a coma till 3am this morning when I got called out for Ice Control again.
Now they are calling for 2-5 inches again tonight through tomorrow. UGH......what happened to the 65 degrees we had on Friday!? I am so ready for spring!!
I am now going to head to bed as it is 7:30pm as I am writing this and I am sure I will be called out around midnight. Hope everyone has a great Friday!
Goodnight,
Kenny
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