The Sand Has Arrived (mostly)

We had decided that if at all possible we would get our sand dumped directly into the pit.  This would avoid the horrible fate of having enormous sand piles in the front driveway which would require multiple hundreds of wheelbarrow trips to the back yard.  The only problem would be the truck driving over our lawn.  The sand company told us that their full size trucks never deliver to residential back yards.  Upon seeing the size of the trucks, I could see why.  They gave us the name of an independent contractor, Andy, who has a smaller truck that delivers 5 cubic yards at a time compared to 10 with the big trucks.   I called Andy and had him come out to assess whether he was comfortable bringing his truck around through the front yard to the pit.  His main concern was whether the grass was too soft or not.  I had the feeling that he would make the delivery if I gave him the green light regardless.  It hadn't really rained at all since the day I dug the hole with the excavator, so the lawn was pretty firm.  I decided to give it a go and see what happened.

The next day Andy arrived at 8:45 am.  It had rained slightly that night, as fate would have it.  He drove the truck, which was slightly over its rated weight in sand, onto the front lawn, then pulled forward again.  We took a look at the track that were left behind and decided that the displacement was acceptable.  Not ideal, but acceptable.  It was quite obvious that two parallel dump-truck sized ruts were impressed into the lawn.  Luckily they were not too deep.  He jumped back into the truck and backed it up to dump the first load into the pit!  We finally had sand, but there was a lot of work to do yet.  Andy would go back to the quarry and reload to return with two more dumps for the day, as he had a bigger job in Houston (30 minutes up the road).  It was a scramble to move enough sand to clear a spot for a second, and even more difficult to clear for a third dump.  News flash:  wet sand is heavy!!!  The truck had a 30-minute round trip that seemed more like 10.  We had just flattened out the first dump when the second came.  By time the third had arrived, we had barely gotten the top bit of the pile knocked down.  The third dump ended up being a tricky maneuver to fid a corner that was free of sand.  All but 1 and 1/2 sides are unaccessable for the dump.  We fit it in and spent the rest of the day re-distributing sand across the bottom of the pit to affix the landscaping fabric for good.

Three down, six to go.