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Excavate Trench and Separate Soil

6:53
23:02
737.3K views

At 6:53 in

It was a BAD TIME for this building inspector to show up.

What happens here

After demolition, excavate the trench for the new retaining wall. The trench needs to be wide enough (approximately 7 feet at the top) and dug in layers. As you excavate, carefully separate organic topsoil from the mineral soil, creating distinct piles. The organic material is unsuitable for structural backfill and should be kept separate. During this process, continuously check for existing frost footings along the house foundation to ensure they are not undermined, especially near the sun porch area. Use the excavator's grapple for efficient digging and material separation.

Goal: Dig the retaining wall trench and sort excavated materials.

Tools and materials

  • Excavator with Grapple Attachment Daewoo — Digging the trench and separating soil
  • Shovel — Fine-tuning excavation and detailed soil separation
  • Mineral Soil — To be used for structural backfill
  • Organic Topsoil N/A — To be separated and not used for backfill

What they say

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just showing these guys how you like to ruin stuff here yeah it's great just when you want to get going got got an inspection in the morning and you got to get some base in today and yeah our footing inspection and geogrid inspections coming in the morning so it would sure be nice just to keep being able to move and not have to fix stuff but it seems to be the way things go all right back at it had a hose blow on the uh daewoo here just went and got a new one made up put back together so we can keep digging it's always something i'm gonna cross-thread it alex i'm trying to find the notch here there she goes so the guys have to get this all dug down exposed the trench dug the footing put in place and the first layers of block installed compacted and geogrid laid down before the inspector comes which is happening right away in the morning and the hose blowing wasn't the end of the world but it was a loss of at least three hours of time for this day woo that we just didn't have anticipated into the schedule i know some of you guys right now are saying we'll just reschedule the building inspector well in our neck of the woods to reschedule building inspector means you can only call between the hours of 8 and 8 30. that's when they're in there typically in their office and if you don't if you call outside of those hours you have to leave a message hope they call you back and then you have to schedule it for another day but work is not allowed to go on until the inspector has come out and verified that he's good with everything the way it is so it's very critical to catch that building inspector and to get that done so the rest of the products progress on the job can keep moving forward so we're digging this out for grid we know we're seven feet wide at the top for grid and uh as we're digging this out we're just doing it in in layers [Applause] um and we're also trying to find to make sure there's no frost boatings that we're gonna run into so should be by all rights four feet down from this sun porch here should be the frost footings but we're not finding any which is great for us because we got to oversize our dig for the the wall but as we dig down we got to keep checking just to make sure because you can't undermine the footings

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