Day: April 28, 2026

After waiting indoors this morning for a delivery that needed a signature – batteries for another labour-saving tool that I recently purchased, of which more later – we kept getting intermittent light rain that I didn’t fancy working outside in. So I went shopping instead and after a light lunch managed to get outside later in the afternoon to start on some serious work with my new excavator and dumper.

The first job requiring some proper earth moving is the base for my planned garden tool store and workshop. It will measure 4.5 x 3.5 metres and I intend to lay a concrete base 12.5 cm thick which will require about two cubic metres of concrete. I set out the area at the bottom of my garden a week or so ago with red pegs linked by light string and today marked it with fluorescent marker paint as I wanted to remove the pegs and string so I could start work.

It didn’t take me very long to find out how tricky working the excavator actually is and my admiration for the guys who have done work with much larger machines at my old house at Plazac and here grew by the minute. There’s a definite learning curve and it’ll take me some time to become even half-proficient, if I’m lucky. As it was I drove my new dumper into the excavator’s bucket when initially getting into position to tip earth into and whacked the side of the dumper’s bucket a couple of times while dropping earth into it, fortunately without doing any damage.

It was slow work compared to how quickly a pro would have done it and I only dug out one strip down one side of the base, but knowing how hard the work had been digging out the two bases I laid at my old house in Plazac by hand, I know that I could never have done the same here. There were a few smallish roots there but here there were both stones and a lot more roots, including one very large one which the excavator ripped through with relative ease.

I’ll need to cut it with my electric saw before continuing tomorrow but on the whole I was quite happy with what I managed to get done in not much more than a couple of hours or so.

I may be digging out a bit deeper than necessary but I’m not too worried about that. The reason is that in the fullness of time I will have to lose all of the black stone put down by the builder in my driveway entrance and all around the house, so putting some in this base and the base for my swimming pool to bring them to the correct levels will be a good way of doing that and freeing up some earth that will be highly usable for modelling my garden. But that’s for later.

I already started doing that in a small way today by using my new dumper to transport 400kg of earth at a time to the top of the garden to begin reducing the slope from the back of the house down to the garden. Ultimately I intend to do much more of this and may even need to bring some topsoil in to get what I eventually want to achieve.

So that was it for today. I was very happy with what I managed to do which would have been impossible without my new little excavator and dumper. And this was only the very beginning 😉