Ralls

With spring finally here, our busy season has officially kicked in! We’ve been completing numerous planting, seeding, and hardscaping jobs. One of the more interested jobs we completed took place last week at a residence in New Cumberland. The job task was to extend a current retaining wall so that it would come around a concrete patio. The problem we had with this job was that there was absolutely no machine access to the rear of the house. Even walking to the rear of the home was challenging with the steep slope. To begin this project, we had to start the excavation process. Since there was no machine access, the digging had to be completed by hand. In planning for the job, we knew we had to find a way to get the material to the rear of the home, that didn’t mean carrying block by block. In saying this, we decided to use a crane to move all of our materials. While we had a few guys digging in the back, the crane crew was setting up for the crane to be used. The crane took approximately 45 minutes to set up. Once it was fully functional, we could begin moving stone to the area we had excavated. To keep things organized, we had to use five-gallon buckets filled with the stone. The crane could only lift about 500 pounds, so this process was lengthy. Once all the stone was in the rear, we could then begin moving the block for the wall. The crane could move 6 retaining wall block per load. In total, the retaining wall was a skid and a half of block. To paint a clearer picture, we used one employee to load the materials in the front of the home, another employee in the rear of the home to unload the material, and two employees actually working on installing the wall. This turned out to be quite the process. After all the block was moved, we actually had to stop using the crane because it got too windy. We still had to move three ton of river stone by five-gallon buckets to finish off the project!! This was very tiring, and I don’t think we would sign up to do that again. This project needed the crane to best complete the project.