Renting the Excavator

We rented an excavator the weekend of March 13th. Clint particularly enjoyed this.



We used it to dig three trenches – supply water, sewer, and electrical conduit. We spent almost every hour of daylight from Friday night to Sunday night digging. We are dirty, sunburned, and sore – but, we finished! Here are some pictures of our adventures.

The first thing we did Friday night was to dig up the water meter and move it over. This wasn’t too bad, because it has a flexible connection. We had to get it out of the way of our driveway and sidewalk.

Here’s another shot of the water meter and supply line.

We set the casing back and then Adam dug the trench to the house. This was by far the easiest one – the supply line only has to be 12” below the ground. By the way, we used the rope as a guide – the rope of the left side of the picture is the lot line and on the right side is our driveway.

Saturday morning, we made the connection to the water meter.

And we connected the piping to the house. The pipe sticking up out of the ground is our temporary hose bib.

Next, we dug down to find the end of the electrical conduit that JEA ran from the transformer. It was about 4 feet down. It is supposed to be 30-36”. Yay for extra digging.

We ran 3” conduit from the meter . . .

. . . to the transformer.

We placed red danger tape a foot below the ground, to alert anyone who is digging of the conduit below.

Saturday night we started the sewer trench. We dug most of it on Sunday. This was extra tricky, because it’s deep down (45”) and has many other cables around it. Here, you can see the end of the sewer pipe and the Comcast cable above it. We were careful to dig around it with the shovel, instead of the excavator.

We used a rubber flexible connection to go from JEA’s 6” sewer pipe to our 4” PVC.

We ran the rest of the sewer pipe close to the clean out, careful to keep a good slope. We are not allowed to connect the sewer pipe to the house yet, because we still need to do a pressure test once all the vents are in place inside.

You can see the clean out better in this picture.

We ran yellow caution tape over the sewer line, as well as the supply line.

Then, we finished backfilling all the trenches. We also used the excavator to break up the concrete runoff from when they poured our slab. This makes it much more manageable to dispose.

We are now ready to have the brick mason and roofer finish up their remaining work. We are also getting bids for the insulation and ductwork. The cabinets are being finalized as we speak and should be ordered this week. Things are moving along well and it’s nice to be out of the dirt.