Tractor Time!! Lets Move Some DIRT!
We still had tons of dirt to move and stumps to remove to create a driveway that allowed us to get on and off the build site. We also needed to build a pad for a garage and extend the driveway to the garage pad. What tool would be most useful for such a variety of work? A tractor!!!!
Is that tractor falling off a cliff? No, it's the driveway :( We rented a couple different tractors to get a feel for what our property needed. The first was a smaller 21 hp tractor that we initially thought would be enough to move the necessary dirt...
Puny little tractor After half a day of use, we decided we needed a bigger tractor. So we rented another larger tractor, and this one got some work done! The larger tractor got twice the amount of materials moved in half the time of the smaller tractor.
That's more like it Neither tractor was very well taken care of, as they were rentals, but the better of the two rental tractors was a well abused 59hp Kubota with a backhoe. It sounded like it had never been greased, as any bucket movement caused a terrible squeal.
House pad is done! Our logic in renting tractors was to get a feel for what size would suite our needs for caring for the land (clearing land, hauling logs, snowplowing, tree planting, fence post digging, etc.). There is a downside to renting, EXPENSIVE $$$$! The rentals were completely outrageous, with over $3,000 spent on 5 days, FIVE DAYS of work, PLUS they charged us to fill up the equipment at $6/gal!! (local price is $2.95/gal)! Definitely would have filled it up ourselves if we had realized how expensive their special gas was.
Smoothing out the driveway After contemplation of rental prices and what our future needs for the land are going to be, we settled on buying a tractor. Which was such an ordeal. Comment if you want to know more about the process of buying a tractor, what we looked for and what we ended up choosing. It’s fun, stressful and frustrating. We settled on a machine that was priced below it’s class but was little known in the area. Everything depended on getting a solid tractor to move forward with the property, it was the single largest hold-up in developing our land. http://www.doinglifetiny.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/16-1024x768.jpg Old car door found in driveway Since the land is across the street from an reclaimed dump, we found a bit of historic rubbish hiding in the brush and top layer of dirt (car door on the right in picture above plus a crushed camper from the 60’s or 70’s). http://www.doinglifetiny.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20190708_130313.jpg Driveway gravel being delivered Read the full article