Back Bedroom Bed Foundation Wall, Part 1

Having dug out more than half of the length of the bed, we have exposed the foundation of the house.  While it may be sitting on rock further under the house, around the edges, it seems to be a mix of rock and dirt.  As with much of the rest of the house, it seems reasonable to seal this off with a cement wall, to keep trees and other plants, or animals, from getting under the foundation.

Using an on-line concrete calculator, we figure we will need about 24 bags of 60-pound concrete.  Two trips to Home Depot gets us 24 bags for $72.48.

Next we frame up along the foundation.

And after two days of pouring concrete and letting it dry, we can take the forms down.

Now it's back to digging out dirt and rocks.

The Back Bedroom Bed, Part 2

It's been a couple months since I was able to work in the backyard, but we left off with rocks and dirt that had been excavated, but not cleaned up.

So the first thing to do is to clean this up.  This takes a couple of days.

Then we can extend the excavation, pulling out more rocks and dirt.

At this point, we need to use the jackhammer to break up the larger rocks.

This broke out a large rock from the center of the excavated bed.

To get this out of the pit, we shaped the front edge of the bed by digging out the top part of the dirt, to fill in the bottom part, creating a dirt ramp.  This allows the rock to be rolled up the dirt ramp and out of the pit.

and then we need to dig out that ramp.

After a rain delay, we can remove those rocks,

but the dirt is really too wet to work.  But we can spend the day with the jackhammer and produce a lot of rock that needs to be be cleared out.

Clearing out the rock leaves a well-defined excavation.

We still have dirt and rock to excavate, but this first part looks done.