Garage-June 22, 2008

Dad suggested that I put the progress of my garage on a blog. So here's my attempt.

Dennis Blackburn has been working much more on the garage than me. So most of the credit goes to him. Framing is about 85% complete. The structure has taken its form - you can see what it will look like when it is finished, just without the stucco, siding, roof or doors/windows. We still need to finish framing one dormer, the east side wall in the attic space and finish sheathing. We should have it complete by Wednesday. Then framing will be done! Amazing.

I started the project on April 24. That's when we cut down some trees and dug for the footings and foundation wall and scraped the topsoil. Essentially we made a mess. I rented a Case 580 backhoe excavator and hired one of Dennis' friends, Jason Frandsen, to operate the machine. Jason's father owns an excavation company and Jason was trained to use one. He was extremely skilled. I had thought of doing the excavation myself, but I'm glad I didn't. Those machines are VERY powerful. I probably would have knocked down our chimney, punched a hole in the wall to our family room, or done some other incredibly stupid thing. I actually couldn't believe that a special license isn't needed to run one of those machines. Anyone can go rent one and do all sorts of damage.

During excavation we had to be careful not to hit the utility lines going into our home. Blue Stakes marked the power line, phone line and cable line. We dug by hand to hit those lines. (Actually we didn't hit the power line; it ended up being deeper than our footing depth, but more on that later.) So once we located those lines, we knew where they were and knew what to do.

However, when Jason was scraping the grass and topsoil (about 5 inches down), he hit a line with the backhoe and pulled about 7-10 feet of a conduit out of the soil. I was FREAKED. I had no idea what it was and some of those lines can be very expensive to replace. The good thing is that it was about 5 feet from the nearest painted line that marks the utilities, so if I damaged anything, it wasn't my fault.

I checked all the services to my house and everything was working fine. But I called Blue Stakes and told them what happened. They put out an alert to the companies. Within a few minutes I got a call from Provo City Power. They were concerned that I hit a power line. When I described what happened and what the conduit looked like, he said that was my fiber optic line from iProvo. That's what I thought was most likely since the phone, cable and power lines were marked. But I knew that our TV, phone and internet were connected through a fiber optic line.

What didn't make sense is that the fiber optic line is supposed to be at least 24 inches below the surface, but we hit it at around 5-7 inches. When I explained that to the Provo City Power rep, he didn't act surprised at all. In fact he said that the installers that iProvo hired totally screwed up. They didn't put the line deep enough and they didn't put a tracer in the conduit so that the line can be marked when people want to dig. I had read that iProvo was a problem, and this was one of the costliest. Many people doing anykind of digging - from sprinklers to additions to landscaping - hit these lines because they are shallow and unmarked. Each time a line is broken, it costs the City of Provo lots of money (I've heard figures ranging from $15,000 to $30,000) to fix the problem.

Anyway, we just held the line down with some rocks. and eventually buried the line through the foundation wall and under the new garage slab. Service is fine.

Speaking about rocks.... We have the rockiest soil in the world. Go down a few inches anywhere in our yard, and you will hit a rock. Our area is called the riverbottoms for a reason. They're Provo Potatoes. Without an excavation machine, we would still be digging the foundation. The machine paid them no heed.

I tried posting a video here to show the pre-construction site. But there was a problem with the upload. I'll try again later. My digital camera broke and only took video when we started excavation.