Trench time

At the same time as taking the chimney out, we also worked on digging a new trench between the house and garage for new wiring.  I rented a mini excavator which was fun, and since it was a holiday weekend I got to pick it up Friday at 3pm and return it on Monday morning and still just pay for 1 day.  Even with running it for probably around 10 hours, it only burned about 3 gallons of diesel, so that was cool.

Here it is after most of the trench was done.  We couldn't get under the porch all the way, so we ended up digging that out by hand later.  It's about 4' deep.

I put 3, 2" conduits in it, so I can use one for the new feeder (hopefully 100A), one for the lighting and other random power stuff, and one for data/maybe gas.  We put in the first section of pipe and backfilled it so we could run the excavator close to the deck for getting the hand-dug dirt out easier

Here was starting to backfill the rest of it

And all graded (although not well)

I'm not sure when I'll actually run the conduits into the buildings, but at least this part is done now.