This week I am determined to be brief! And don’t worry about the newsletter title. I couldn’t come up with anything witty, and since I have been working on my septic, that is what came to mind.

• Back on August 18th, I had some gravel delivered for my driveway and to be the support under the septic tanks

• This weekend, I put some of the gravel in the septic hole, leveled it out, and got my first septic tank in tank in place

And that’s it .. until next time!

Mark

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P.S.  Ok let’s face it, I have more to say than that and I can’t be that brief. For those that are really bored I did want to mention something about the septic project/tanks:

When I dug the septic tank hole, I was planning on 2 concrete septic tanks that were 2,000 gallon capacity.  Turns out they were about 16,000 lbs, so I wasn’t going to be able to place them with my excavator. I had scheduled a crane to come out and place them for me.  The day before the tanks were delivered I mentioned to my neighbor that I had the tanks coming and that a 110 ton crane was going to come out and place them for me. Turns out the shared private road wasn’t designed for anything above 75,000 lbs (a fully loaded cement truck). Since my neighbor wasn’t too thrilled I called up my septic designer and we had to call an audible. We decided to switch to plastic tanks which were a bit more expensive, but wouldn’t require me to spend 3k on a crane. I was able to call off the concrete tank delivery and the crane just in time and at no cost to me! phew! In switching to plastic tanks, we had to switch to 3 tanks since the largest tank they make in plastic is 1500 gallon. So I ended up with 2, 1500 gallon tanks and 1, 1000 gallon tank. Now that I have the first plastic tank in the hole I am really happy we made the switch.  It was a stressful day trying to figure that all out but I am glad it worked out!

Next weekend I will go out and place the other two tanks and then before backfilling I need to fill them up with water and have the health department come inspect them. If it passes inspection then I will need to pump all the water out and then back fill. And then I will be done with the tank portion!

The best part about the weekend was that when I left, the excavator was still working! .. The undercarriage (tracks) sound pretty rough. I think I have several bearings that aren’t working well. There are 8 bearings on each track and I wouldn’t be surprised if all 16 need to be replaced.  I would.. except each bearing is around $1000 (that was a year ago so probably more now).  And for all of you out there challenged in the math department that would  end up being at least 16k, which is about 2k less than what I paid for the excavator.

Ok this time I’m done for reals! 

Until next time!

Mark