Dirt, Dirt and more Dirt

Posted by - Deborah

These past couple weeks we've really been working hard on getting our house project done before winter sets in. Well, more than it has already.
We've been doing a lot of shoveling, helping to fill in our big hole we have back there.

Mom's new root cellar

We shoveled for so long one day that it hurt when we pried our fingers off our shovels.

And we shoveled in the rain.

Not to brag at how big our muscles are getting. :)

Quentin and Abigail

Anna and Josh

Quentin, Abigail, and Josh

Quentin and I

We didn't get all the stuff done on the wall and the root cellar till the ground was pretty much frozen solid.

Dad and Quentin working on putting the membrane up, it was so cold out that they had to use a blow torch to heat it up before it would stick .

Dad putting up the ground cloth that covered the drain tile.

So Dad rented the backhoe from the city so it could give us some much needed help in filling in our hole.

Dad in the backhoe (he had fun :)

The backhoe didn't work too good, he tried a couple different buckets but the ground was too hard for it
to do much good.
So we got this big guy, the excavator, and it did the trick. It helped that it warmed up some so the ground wasn't as hard (I mentioned the raining right?).
We didn't have to do too much more shoveling after we got the excavator, which was nice.

The excavator

We all had some fun while we watched Dad and the excavator work. 

Benjamin got the not so fun part of being the target.

Joshua decided to help him out.

 The next day all we had to do was go out and level everything out.

Look! There's no hole!

Now we can spend the rest of the winter working on the inside, getting the floor down, putting the walls up, and maybe doing some painting?

Quentin putting insulation up in the root cellar.