Pic of our dig

[adillenal]

This is what happens when you are naive and don't know that the land you live on is mostly rock.
http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m77/ilindell/3e9f3230.jpg

[joelq]

Wow! Whereabouts in Texas are you? The Hill Country?

[adillenal]

The edge. We are an hour due East of Austin. We built our pool last summer and the rock sure made for slow going.

[tagprod]

The edge. We are an hour due East of Austin. We built our pool last summer and the rock sure made for slow going.

Giddings, I suppose? I've heard of pools that cost 35K here in Houston running Austin folks 60K due to the excavation problems.

[adillenal]

Exactly. Good guess. The local pool builder would not even come to our house to look at the backyard and give us a bid. That should have been a clue but there is an inground gunite pool about 4 miles down the road from us so we never thought about ROCK. Closer to town and in town isn't as much of a problem. We just happen to be in an area that has a shallow soil layer. NOW I found out about that. The aerobic septic system swe have should have been another clue. No field lines and the treated water is attached to a sprinkler system.

[ChuckD]

In a previous lifetime I was a steel worker for a small rebar fabricator shop and delivered steel to several sites where the homeowners were actually blasting to excavate a foundation (well, they weren't, a hired professional was).

Seems like it's be a more efficient way to do this, but I've no idea the cost comparison....


C.

[adillenal]

THe teenager in the picture would have loved the blasting idea. :D He is looking for fossils in the broken up rock. That was interesting. We found lots of leaf fossils. Kind of interesting.

[tagprod]

so what's the game plan for that rock?

[sevver]

I have both blasted and broke many jobs putting in pipe, it is a slow process (not that I minded), and makes the entire job that much harder. Another fun thing, generally breaking rock makes a void for water to fill into. You would want a wellpoint or two put in next to the pool in case something comes up in the future.

[adillenal]

The neighbor used a lot of it to build a road and for fill. I am hoping he will move the rest of the plain dirt to level his yard. He is building a new house.

What is a wellpoint?

[matt4x4]

A wellpoint is a vertical pipe reaching to the area under your pool (preferrably gravel) into which you can push a garden hose to the bottom of the pipe, then use a pump on the garden hose to pump out any water that could exert hydrostatic pressure on your pool. If you ever need to lower your water level for a repair or something, this comes in really handy.

[adillenal]

Thanks MAtt. I learn something new everyday.