California - Sitework

While the site was previously leveled and used (click here for info on the design aspect), there was still quite of bit of site work that was necessary: rip off any organic material or topsoil, dig footings, dig utility lines, dig a hole of a septic tank and a bunch of trenches for a leach field, plus gravel the access road and a fire-truck turn-around area.  In addition, the guest house site was discovered to be about half partially consolidated fill, so the entire site was excavated and re-compacted to make it uniform.

There is nothing "green" about this process.  You to try disturb as little area as possible, but either way you end up consuming a lot of fuel.  A few companies use bio-diesel, but in the big picture its not clear how green this option really is.

We dug close to 300' of utility trenches (24" deep), more than 400' of sewer lines and leach field ditches (anywhere from 24" to 72" deep) and maybe another 300' of footing ditches (12-18" deep).  Some was easy digging, some was in hard sandstone.

Scraping the surface.

This area was excavated to 6' deep, and re-compacted one foot at a time

Because the rock would break along its grain, the footings ended up being nothing like the square boxes drawn on the plans, and the result is that they're all bigger than designed.  Made me wonder how much this happens, and how much concrete is wasted in the process (see more on this under concrete).

Guest house footprint marked out-Kim in the future window seat.

The main house footings and waste line ditches

The existing septic system was both far away and of unknown quality, so we built a new one.  The catch was that the minimum design is for 400gal/day, which is ballpark 8 times out typical daily use.  While I would like to have disturbed much less land, the oversized capacity gives us a lot of failure room, which is good since we hit bands of hard rock in places indicating that the overall perk rate will be less than the spot tested rate.

Septic tank in place; the left ditch is the outlet line to the leach field.

Digging the 3rd of 4 leach field trenches.  Note pipes sitting on fabric,  which is on drain rock.

View of the building site taken from the hill to the west. The upper trench is for water from the storage tank, and the lower ones are the septic & leach field.

The well is approximately 10 feet below (to the right, behind them)where the machines are and has a submersible pump that fills the tank.  Gravity from the tank provides about 12lbs of pressure..enough to get by in the case of power failure, but otherwise not enough, so there will be a booster pump.

We used the excess soil to build out a pad for a utility shed and also for a parking space for the guest house, so no soil had to transported away.