Making A Huge Tiny House - By Gleaning: Moving Dirt

We broke ground, the first bite with the shovel.

This is the hard part, moving dirt around with a shovel and hoe. Today my dear husband is going to be out by himself. Yesterday we toke out the old logs supports for the shade sail covering. It sounds like we had it pretty dolled up but in all actuality it was seriously rustic.

Our bedroom, currently decorated with rocks, weeds, one of the old log posts
as well and a huge amount of dirt that we are moving with a shovel.

One has to beg the question why are you doing it by hand? We don't own the equipment to do it by machine, we want it and so to get it we have to level the land. The choice then is to grumble and whine, or shovel. We choose to shovel. It is very hard land too. We have a layer of basalt that is about 4 feet thick.

This is so hard we have to use the heavy pick bar to break it up before shoveling it
into the dips to smooth out the build out area of the Huge Tiny House. Eventually,
there will be a bit of landscaping to make it pretty.

We also have to pull the trailer out from under the lean-to roof. Now that it is no longer viable to use; since it was vandalized, we will recover the roof, shore it up and use it for another part of the Huge Tiny House. We will also recover the stove and refrigerator as a temporary kitchen too that is inside the poor old thing. It's pretty frustrating because we had spent a good amount of time and money dolling her up and someone senselessly tore it apart.

Ah well, just wait and see what we do to the gazebo area.

All four posts are rotting at the bottom.

One of the steps, as soon as the dirt is all moved around, is to replace all four log posts with 2 by 6 beams. Once they are in place we will put in the sub-floor, and then the walls. Of course I will have pictures, and at some point we will have video of all the exciting parts.

We are building around the rock, it sits just outside the gazebo, it's awesome and it will look cool peeking out of the small deck, emerging as the mighty Rock of Charles. Someone already asked why we don't move it...this after asking why we only have shovels to work with. Shovels move mountains, but not big rocks.

Besides, nature has a way of taking care of that all on her own. Once we are out there I will keep this tiny little tree watered it is obviously rooted just fine so it will be the dominant force over the rock. In time it will split the rock, allowing us to move it or leave it at that time. It is a symbol of what we are doing don't you think? Laying down roots in a hard spot and sticking around, giving the place the time to let us grow our own roots.

If you look close you can see the twine marking off the area we have to dig to level. There was a huge hump right there that had to be cleared, about 600 pounds of dirt. Now it is just a bunch of grunt work to get it all moved over to the right and then leveled. It's a good thing we don't have to take the dirt very far.

You can also see we have to pull out one of the posts that is in the way, right there will be the end of our bed. I marvel at our ability to move something that weighs a lot. Below you can see once we took out the post Michael dragged it out of the way by tying on a strap and using a 2' by 4' to lever it across the old firepit area and off the landing.