Finally got this project goin' with the little warm spell we've had. I've been hauling water since 2008 and it's finally time to do up a well.
Simple enough project really - dig a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft deep hole, toss in a 10' piece of 24" culvert vertically, back fill the hole with pea stone, and let'er fill.
I wanted to dig the whole thing by hand. I had my buddy Branden help me out with the project. On Thursday we got the first 4' no problem (took a full day of digging). The first foot was topsoil, the next 3ft was a brown colored hardpacked clay (heavy as hell but it stayed in tact and didn't collapse or break apart). The next 4ft was a different story. It's a grey colored clay, and when it gets saturated it turns practically into soupy quicksand. Water started to gather in the hole and almost instantly that stuff was really hard to scoop out. I tried and tried to shovel/scoop it out by hand but it continually kept filling in from the sides. The walls wouldn't stay up like the 3ft of brown clay above it, it was literally like pancake batter. I had a huge desire to do the whole thing by hand but I wasn't able to scoop it out faster than it would flow back in, so I bugged my neighbor down the road who has a backhoe. He shoveled it out in about 30 minutes and we got the pipe in.
Starting the dig.
Dan (the westspartan) givin' me a hand.
MuddChuck'r
That was the first day. We got down to a little over 4ft deep (but we got the center hole to about 6ft deep with the post hole diggers). The hole didn't fill with water right away like I had expected, so there were some doubts that this part of the yard was even going to work. But by Friday morning, there was over 6' of standing water in that hole. :)
Covered it up the night before, it was supposed to rain. If only a tiny bit of water got in the hole, I wanted to be sure it was ground water and not have rain water get in there to skew the results. Didn't matter though as it was full of water the next morning.
Unloading pea stone.
Didn't get much done with the actual hole on Friday, I did a lot of running around to get a ton of stuff for getting the pipe in. Got muh culvert and muh lumber. At this point I hadn't dealt with that grey quicksand/clay. I planned on building a 4-sided wall out of 2x3's and OSB to keep the walls from collapsing in on me as I dug deeper. It was a decent design idea and theoretically the wall would travel down with me as I removed more material.
Saturday, 9:00am. Rented a 2" sump pump, ready to rock with getting this wall built and down in the hole.
Throwin' the wall together.
It fits!
Simple enough project really - dig a 4ft by 4ft by 8ft deep hole, toss in a 10' piece of 24" culvert vertically, back fill the hole with pea stone, and let'er fill.
I wanted to dig the whole thing by hand. I had my buddy Branden help me out with the project. On Thursday we got the first 4' no problem (took a full day of digging). The first foot was topsoil, the next 3ft was a brown colored hardpacked clay (heavy as hell but it stayed in tact and didn't collapse or break apart). The next 4ft was a different story. It's a grey colored clay, and when it gets saturated it turns practically into soupy quicksand. Water started to gather in the hole and almost instantly that stuff was really hard to scoop out. I tried and tried to shovel/scoop it out by hand but it continually kept filling in from the sides. The walls wouldn't stay up like the 3ft of brown clay above it, it was literally like pancake batter. I had a huge desire to do the whole thing by hand but I wasn't able to scoop it out faster than it would flow back in, so I bugged my neighbor down the road who has a backhoe. He shoveled it out in about 30 minutes and we got the pipe in.
Starting the dig.
Dan (the westspartan) givin' me a hand.
MuddChuck'r
That was the first day. We got down to a little over 4ft deep (but we got the center hole to about 6ft deep with the post hole diggers). The hole didn't fill with water right away like I had expected, so there were some doubts that this part of the yard was even going to work. But by Friday morning, there was over 6' of standing water in that hole. :)
Covered it up the night before, it was supposed to rain. If only a tiny bit of water got in the hole, I wanted to be sure it was ground water and not have rain water get in there to skew the results. Didn't matter though as it was full of water the next morning.
Unloading pea stone.
Didn't get much done with the actual hole on Friday, I did a lot of running around to get a ton of stuff for getting the pipe in. Got muh culvert and muh lumber. At this point I hadn't dealt with that grey quicksand/clay. I planned on building a 4-sided wall out of 2x3's and OSB to keep the walls from collapsing in on me as I dug deeper. It was a decent design idea and theoretically the wall would travel down with me as I removed more material.
Saturday, 9:00am. Rented a 2" sump pump, ready to rock with getting this wall built and down in the hole.
Throwin' the wall together.
It fits!
