We weren’t too concerned because it was not terribly cold in the cabin-until we discovered that both the water and sewer plumbing was frozen. 🥶🥶 This was an even bigger problem than it first appeared to be because we both had to poop and there was only one bathroom. 💩💩😬😬 So we spent the next several hours carefully heating up water lines with a propane torch, plunging the toilet in hopes of getting it working, and prairie dogging something fierce.
Did I mention there’s reasons we avoid working in this kind of weather?
Finally, once everything was thawed and we sent the brown trouts out to sea, it was time to employ alternate methods to get ground screws in.
Short version-we turned this guys front yard into a war zone.
First we had to dig a trench about 6’ deep and 10’ long.
Out of that trench came tons of rocks, a few boulders, and not much dirt.
I used the bucket teeth to sift rocks from the dirt, then I had to carefully scoop all the dirt , drop it back in the ditch, and compact it.
The pictures don’t really do justice to how much material we had to process, or just what a mess this was. They also don’t show the huge hole we dug nearby to steal dirt out of so we could have enough to backfill with because we removed so many big rocks. 🙄
Finally, we re-measured and remarked the screw locations and drove home the last screws.
It’s hard to see, but at 12:30 Tuesday we had all nine screws in and Denise was happy to have another picture taken. 😄
At this point the yard was somewhat put back together-but not for long because we next had to dig a trench for the underground conduit from the array to the house.
Here’s what that rocky mess looked like.
If it looks like a huge mess with big rocks everywhere, it’s because it was.
After we got our conduit in, we snapped a few pictures for the inspector who agreed to let us backfill and just show him pictures at final inspection.
The process of finishing backfilling, dropping lots of big rocks into our borrow pit, and putting this yard back together would drag on until we couldn’t see anymore, and continue for several more hours the following morning.
Our last view of day-
