Digging Up Our Awesome Driveway

1st Week of April 2007 - Don't be alarmed. This was planned. The electric and telephone have to go in before the mat and gravel are put down. Here's Sam, with Byron watching the master, starting at the power pole which just happened to be right next to the driveway. I'd like to give Sam credit for this, but I think he'd agree we just got lucky. The cable behind Byron is copper for telephone and, unheard of in them thar hills, fiber optic for Internet and cable TV. No extra charge to us, this is just where they chose to start offering the service.

This reel of power cable,

has to go in this conduit.

Electrician Bob Garland and Sam.

This was cool. They attached a string to a ping pong ball, attached a vacuum cleaner to the opposite end of the conduit and sucked the ball and string through. Then they attached this line to the string and pulled it through. To the end of that line they attached the power cable, tied the line to the ball hitch of the truck and pulled the cable through.

Cleaning Up

1st Week of April 2007 - What a mess!

Sam burned the tops and also the stumps only to the point where they would burn no more. He hauled 44 big truckloads of stumps to the grinder. Cha-ching!

Sam's son, Byron Proffit, chain saw operator extraordinaire.

Our Awesome Driveway

March 2007
Here are way too many pictures of our approx. 900' driveway. At one time we considered asking our neighbor (not Sherry) to sell us easement along our lot line to avoid all this excavating, but we would have missed seeing all this pretty acreage.

There are two 3' diameter, 20' long culverts here that we helped Sam place.

This is a "wet-weather" babbling brook. I'm going to plant a flowering dogwood on the left and place a rustic bench in front of it.

At the top!

Some of the logs destined for the neighbors.

The building site.

Oh, yeah.