Great News!

 A neighbor, he lives about a quarter mile away just over the town line in Baldwin, stopped by while Martin and I were digging out roots and leveling the backyard. He offered the free use of his backhoe to remove the to pine stumps and to dig the basement.  This is great news since the towable backhoe is great for digging areas where the dirt is going to go right back into the same spot (laying pipe), but isn't great for moving lots of dirt.

We have some prep to do before we are ready for him to come, like getting areas ready for the sand from under the house to be dumped when it gets dug out.  Martin also needs to do some foundation work before the full basement gets dug.

This is such a relief. We thought we were going to dig the entire basement by hand, hauling the sand out in five gallon buckets.

We had an area behind the house that we had slightly dug up and another area behind the barn.  Part of the reason why we dug it up was because both areas had lots of small scrub trees which meant stumps and roots. Also both areas had been used to dump stuff which we felt needed to be removed.  Initially we came in with the back hoe and just dug the areas to pull out stumps, roots, and junk.  We left the ground very uneven.  Since then lots of weeds grew with abandon. We had briars, sunflowers, milkweed, sumac, celandine, lambs quarters, etc. etc. We just spent a couple of days, pulling weeds and roots.  Then we spread and raked the soil to level it. there were a couple of areas where the topsoil looked a bit better than the average sand that usually makes up the topsoil at an tigin. This got wheelbarrowed into the pile of topsoil.  

We are planning on putting sand from the behind the barn.  Any other topsoil we move will go in the smaller pile behind the newly leveled area behind the house.