Opening the road to the building location

I realized that I’m such a city girl then I’ve ever admitted to myself until we came up here. At first I didn’t know what to do; felt unable and upset for the amount of things that needs to be done and not being able to do them. It was Ivan’s idea to buy the backhoe. I thought he was crazy even for considering it because he didn’t know how to drive a backhoe or anything similar to that. But he did it anyway. He even had the courage to drive it on the highway to the land instead of hiring a toe-truck. It took him 7 hours going 20km/hr. I would’ve never done that; but I’m so grateful that he did.

When the backhoe arrived, we thought Ivan would be the one driving it. But he decided that that should be my role since I’m useless in lifting heavy rocks or chopping wood. This machine is now my best friend because it enabled me. I feel so much happier working on it and get some shit done.

This video shows how I remove the top soil so that plants wouldn’t grow. The biggest challenge I had was the rocks under the surface preventing the backhoe to go straight. Other than that I’d say this job is pretty easy.

The second part of the project was actually extending the road to the building site. In this section we had to cut trees and remove stumps. Ivan was cutting trees and splitting them into smaller size logs, his mom was collect all the brush (branches) to a pile on the side of the barn. My role was to dig the stumps out with the backhoe, remove the top soil and flatten the road as much as possible.

The road work hasn’t been completed yet. This year we’re continuing to even-out and widen the road by bringing loads of pit-run and spreading it around. Once this is done we will wait a season to observe how the water is behaving. Then we plan to open some trenches to direct the water and plant some bushes and small trees on the sides.