I help out at a local produce co-op, Bountiful Baskets. We spent the morning distributing produce, but we only had eight volunteers compared to our usual 12-18, so it took a little longer than usual.
I then went home and rallies the kids to clean up the backyard. We had to get rid of the dog's "mess" and the mess made by the dog and kids. Our dog has become a chewing animal. Actually, she always was, she just seems to have gone on a bender lately.
Anyway, I got the kids working, and I started trying to level some ground to lay some pavers. I hit a rock pretty early and set out to dig it up. Right about this time, one of the neighborhood teenagers came over to heckle me, so I recruited him to the rock removal cause.
The rock turned out to be a three by three foot square of concrete with large river rock on the bottom. It was 10-12 inches thick I was able to pick it up and move it, but just barely. Moving this piece uncovered another small piece, so we started digging again.
This time we had problems finding the edge. And soon another neighbor joined the party. We took a few breaks to play with our friend Mr. Snake. He's about 16 inches long now.
After around an hour we had found more of the edges. It was about 3.5-4 feet wide and 5 feet long. This piece was between 8-15 inches thick. It also looked like it might go under the fire pit I built last year.
We tried to break this piece with a sledge hammer, we tried to pry it up, we dug under it and tries to break it again. Nothing was working. Then my neighbor mentioned he had a hand wench in his car. So he got that and we anchored it to a stump in the back. We ended up pulling the stump out of the ground (see below.)
So we anchored it to our apple tree and just tries to put some tension on the slab so we could break it easier. Still no dice. I got out my cheap Harbor Freight angle grinder, and I burned out the motor. We took some more whacks at it. It wouldn't budge. We dug some more, and got it to move a little bit.
We moved the anchor over to our maple tree. This helped pivot it a bit more. I didn't have a really good lever to use, or so I thought. I had bent my pick axe trying to use it. I went searching and found a 10 foot 4x4. I decided to use this, and we were able to move it a little bit.
We changed how the rope was placed around the slab, we went from a simple loop to a harness and it moved quite well.
Now our only problem was we were hitting the fire pit. We ended up damaging a couple of bricks on the top, which I'll have to fix later. We used the 4x4 to pry it around the pit and were able to drag it out of the hole.
I'd decided that I wasn't going to get this out of my backyard very easily, so I'm going to incorporate it into the patio. This meant we had to flip it over.
After another half hour, some more leveraging, and a bit of brute strength it was finally flipped. After the ground is leveled I'll move it into place.
This also took most of my free time for Saturday, and kind of wiped me out.
We had a barbecue at my sister-in-laws that afternoon. The wife got to hold our newborn nephew for quite some time, even though it probably wasn't enough for her.
I'm thankful for our family and neighbors.
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