Friday, June 9, 2017

Side Tracked!

So last weeks post didn't go up as planned, woops! Just as well though because this week we got nothing done on the trailer.

Alex's original on the phone quote for the trailer frame of "about 1000$" turned out to be something closer to 1200$ in person and if we wanted the bed inset between the wheels and the bed wrap around the wheels it was another 250$. Plus 100$ for plates plus I wanted fold down jacks for the corners which was going to be another 100$, plus 13% sales tax and we were looking at 1865$ for a trailer frame. I don't know about you but I've seen full blown utility trailers with walls and all at Lowe's for 1100$ or 1243$ after taxes and last time I was there they had 10% off, so at that time it was actually 1133$. This steps us back a bit to think.

We have a MIG welder and the capability to build our own so I'm thinking that's the road we're going to take. I found this website that breaks down step by step to build a trailer with pictures and everything so I will probably use that as my base design and assembly instructions. I still want to do the wrap around the wheel wells thing for more storage space and I'm planning to ask the Teardrops and Tiny Travel Trailer community on the leveling jacks.

All this came to a screeching sharp halt when 14 yards of clean quarter inch gravel and a back hoe showed up in my driveway Friday night.

The beauty we rented from Home Depot!

We spent the entire weekend digging and dumping and moving earth. We had three major tasks that we did not want to dig by hand:
  1. Roughly 100 feet across the back part of our yard used to be a ditch but it's been mostly leveled out over the years and now it's more of a swamp in the spring. The plan was dig it up, put down some gravel, big-O filtered, more gravel, some weed paper, earth back in ground. 
  2. Sump pump hose gets moved every time we cut the grass and it's been forgotten at the house a couple of times. To prevent there being water in the basement again we wanted to bury the pipe and have it run to a hole full of rocks.
  3. We want to build a stone patio for our fire place :) (this one makes me the happiest!)
So that consumed our whole weekend. A flat tire later and a guy out to do the repair, me running to the store because we forgot to buy 200 ft of big-O, swinging by to take my moms dog to the vet and made for a chaotic weekend. We still didn't get everything done but we got a big chunk of it done finally!

And now for some pictures!!!


Looking left and right along the ditch at the back while we were dropping the big-O and gravel/digging

The "finished" product after I filled in the ditch again

Alex digging the trench for the sump pump line