Getting your Foot in the door... um er.... ground

Next step is to actually start with the action!  There are footing holes to be dug, for both the outer frame and then for the flooring.  We start with just the outer shed footing holes, otherwise the site would resemble Lightening Ridge - with bloody holes, bloody everywhere!

The footing holes were marked out, with precision and pink paint, by the trainee engineer.  The creative marketer wandered around and looked at things, and sighed when she had to hold a tape measure.

I am not sure how they do it in the construction industry, but I am pretty sure digging footings with a post hole digger is not doing things the easy way.  Easier than with just a post hole shovel - sure - but...

We hooked up the post hole digger to the old blue tractor.  Now a post hole digger should look like this:

It should go in the ground in a nice straight manner – and be pretty predictable as to where the hole you want is going to end up.

Unfortunately for us – that is not the case with our post hole digger.

Our digger looks more like this:

And operates in a manner similar to this:

So there is quite a bit of  “up a bit, down a bit – to the right.  Woo.  Nah back up a bit – that’s pretty close”

Which is ok when you are building a fence line, but not ideal when you are building a building.  And especially not great when your lead construction person needs to have things ‘square’ and your trades assistant is more the creative type than the exacting type.

Hmmm.

I think you can see where this is going.

So when the smoke cleared the footing holes have been dug.  There there was some swearing, but luckily the holes are wide so the inaccuracy of the inattentive creative type can be compensated.   They are also really deep which is a bit of over kill.  Totally over engineered is where we are trying to get to.

I loved seeing all that beautiful soil that came up on the auger.  Such a  rich chocolate  brown, really friable – with worms!  Gotta love a heathy eco-system.  It had that great smell as well, and made the job of clearing away the spoils not as bad as it could be.

I don’t think I could spend all day on the end of a shovel – but it was pretty fun.