WHY do I need an excavator?

I’ve had one or two comments like, ‘Why do you need to buy a machine… why don’t you just pay people to do the job’. Well, the answer is that ‘the job’ is very open-ended. I’ve done a lot of travelling this year (by my standards anyway) and I don’t intend to do any next year, apart from go to my son’s wedding in September.

The WHOLE of next year is therefore earmarked for my garden and I intend to devote all of my efforts to that end while I’ve still got the strength, capacity and motivation to do it. The land my house is built on was originally just open farmland and still looks like it. I don’t want it to stay that way.

I want to make it into a space, front and back, that’s attractive and that I want to be in so there’s a lot of work needing to be done. For a start the plot slopes the whole way down from the road 7 metres from top to bottom. A level area was created on which the house was built but the garden slopes down from the road to the house and then down further to the bottom.

So that needs to be sorted. I don’t yet know exactly how but from the researches I have done I’m going to need to create several levels and terraces and sloping paths and stepped areas joining them so a lot of earth is going to need to be shifted. I’m also going to need to bring in some large rocks etc that I’m going to need to move around to get the final result that I want.

And that’s on top of the other work I have planned, like installing the swimming pool with a retaining wall, putting a French drain in across the front of the house to take away water that pools there, putting in a concrete base for a tool store cum workshop down at the bottom of the garden plus a trench to take electricity down to it, plus extending the concrete base in the front garden for a garage later on. And then there’s the fencing – I’ve also ordered a post auger to come with the excavator.

And that’s just the stuff that comes to mind right now. I’m sure that lots of other tasks will emerge as work progresses and I may be wrong, but by my estimates having my own excavator will make it easier (and cheaper) to get things done as and when I want them and also, just as importantly, by doing the work myself, how I want them done. But only time will tell.