I’ve yet to do a full iron distance. One more year and my daughter will be in kindergarten, and my son will be in preschool. Then my training will really start.
I have done something I think is iron worthy though. Something that not your average person would undertake.
My house was built with a dirt crawl space. Once I knew I had a child coming, I wanted more room in the house. I dug out, with a pick, shovel and wheelbarrow a basement. I dug out a 17 by 36 foot basement moving red Georgia clay that was about five feet deep. I replaced all the supports, dug the drainage trench and put in a 36 inch steel door. I then built a stairwell leading down from a closet.
The only thing I didn’t do was put up the cinder block walls and pour the cement floor. It took me from Thanksgiving until Easter to finish. It also helped level out my backyard with all that dirt.
“moving red Georgia clay that was about five feet deep.”
I would consider that very iron worthy. I had never seen the stuff before until I visited Road Atlanta to watch car racing. It was raining and that red clay turned to muck.It was everywhere and once it’s on your boots/clothing you can’t get rid of it. Tracked it into the car and it took a month of cleaning before it was gone.
Red Georgia clay is something you can’t appreciate unless you’ve had to deal with the stuff.
damn, that is insane. Are you an engineer? Did you get permits from your municipality before beginning this project? Do you think that you may have compromised the structural integrity of your home by digging a big hole under it?
I’m not an engineer, and what the town doesn’t see, then no permit for me!
I did do quite a bit of research, my Dad has been in construction for his whole life, and I think the house is better off for it. When it was just a crawlspace, it was always damp, even with plastic sheeting down there.
Now it’s all drained properly, has a dehumidifier, pressure treated beams holding the joist, and steel supports holding the beams rather than cinder block collums.
I try and post pictures later. Right now my kids want to go to the park.
How did you keep the hole from collapsing in as you dug. I am considering the same thing but worry about digging near the supports etc and having it collapse as I do so.
I still have nightmares of the red clay. If it rained, it would get in the basement and all work had to stop. You couldn’t walk, or after walking ten feet, your shoes would weigh ten pounds.
I had clothes that were just dyed red and my legs looked tan from all the red clay getting on them.
As for Road Atlanta, I love that place. I gotta get bacl to se the Petit Le Mans this year.
Wow, I was thinking about doing that with one of my old houses. Ended up moving instead, but it certainly it is an undertaking… I bet you’re glad to be done!
I think I have a fairly decent iron worthy story. Let me know if it is up to par…
When I was in my early 20s I built custom homes for a couple of years. We had a crew of me, one other guy, and the architect; and hand built some damn fine houses I might add. Anyway we were putting the finishing touches on two houses in adjacent lots which were on a pretty steep hill with the back of the foundation being 28 ft higher than the front. (That’s a pretty steep lot folks)
That year we had had an exceptionally wet spring so the hillside started to give way behind the house in potential landslide fashion. Because the architect didn’t want to loose his investment by letting the hillside bury the two brand new beautiful custom homes in mud, he decided we needed to build a retaining wall behind the houses to hold the mountain back. Therefore he started calling for dump trucks filled with computer monitor sized rocks to be delivered… Each rock weight between 40 and 80 pounds…
The hillside was really muddy and greasy (anyone from Colorado can relate to that clay that sticks to everything). It was a challenge just walking up without carrying anything. We did try to get some heavy equipment up there in order to take the rocks from the road to the back of the houses, but it just didn’t fly because of both the mud and lack of room to get between the houses. That’s when the hell started and we began hand carrying rocks to the back of the houses. Keep in mind these rocks were just about as heavy as you could lift, then you had to climb up a steep muddy hill with them and deposit them on the mother of all retaining walls behind the houses (in 90+ degree summer Colorado heat).
After all is said and done the retaining wall was about 200 feet long and had 15+ tons of large rocks every 10 feet (all of which had to be placed and replaced in the anal fashion the architect demanded). If you add that up, my friend and I hand-carried over 200 tons of rocks up that damn hill for 8 to 10 hours a day, 6 days a week for a few weeks. That kind of labor makes a guy pretty strong. Of course now I am writing this with dishpan hands at my desk because all I do is type on a computer all day but that is another story…
“It puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again…”
Just kidding…sounds like quite the project. I am interested in seeing just how big of a project this must have been.
My basement is a bit strange. There is a very large boulder in one corner with the floor and wall built around it. Inspector guy said that since it was built in the very late 1890’s that it most likely was a “we are committed after digging so much that we will just leave it there” kind of thing.
i haven’t done anything like that, but this past winter i trained specifically for the landscaping projects for this year (that I insist on doing myself…why???). all in all I’ve dug up half of my yard and moved it all around. you know it was serious when i moved nearly 2 yards of dirt in two hours ;).
I doubt this is iron worthy but it involved some pretty heavy lifting (literally). In 2003 Hurricane Juan hit Nova Scotia and the storm surge stripped the shoreline at my cottage of a wooden crib filed with boulders. Last summer I had to rebuild it. The crib is built with logs cut from telephone poles, railroad ties, and boulders. Everything had to be moved uphill and it is not possible to use a tractor or crane without mega money for a barge, etc. Once the crib was built it had to be filled with boulders. I used a block and tackle to move the big stuff (which makes it easier to understand how stuff was built in the days before engines and electricity). This summer I plan to build a new piece if I can find the right size logs. Amazingly, I am actually looking forward to this.
well, let’s just say no woman in my neighborhood is out there in boots with a shovel, backing a truck in the yard, picking up heavy clumps of dirt, etc. it’s a miracle if someone cuts their own damn lawn around here. so between this and my affinity for bird watching, yeah, they pretty much all think I’m straight crazy. lol.
my neighbor asked me recently, “so, what are you going to kill yourself on this weekend?”. the response? “Oh, just going to put in a new shade garden in the space up front, move this forsythia, dig up that tree, transplant all of those mature roses, move these giant grasses, backfill that trench, and put in a new wildflower garden along the back.” The look on her face! It was hilarious! lol.
compared to your thing though, i think this is more like a half iron–lol.
