Ok folks, here it is……….. after all of my babbling all summer, it is done except electrical. Here are the final steps.
The original plan was to place the drain shown in the picture below, until…. we took a closer look at slope and where the water would most likely flow to and prompted the change to the placement shown in the picture above. This was not in the plan and I experienced my quality of compaction into the road-base layer under the larger gravel. That chit was like concrete due to how well it compacted. The pick bounced off of it like stone and I had to use the Hitachi demo hammer with spade tip to dig down into it. Anyone wanting a good base, I recommend a high clay content road-base, some water and a good compactor.
Due to a much larger pour, I reached out to the local family owned concrete company that are truly a bunch of really good guys and inquired about a good finisher. Talk about a small world, I ended up reconnecting with a good dude who was on our property 17 years ago with his dad who I hired to do some bobcat work. He came out and helped form the steps on our project and made some suggestions on things I could improve. He also caught the fact the water would flow to the other side. The pour was calculated to take 4.5 yards of six sack mix and I requested “stealth fiber” to be added as well. I initially estimated just shy of 5 yds, he initially estimated 4 yards and then when we ran the hard numbers last night, we came up with the 4.5 yrds. The intended use for the lower pad is to hold a small hot tub that Mrs. Bugs ordered and our local home show. It’s nothing fancy and will do us just fine. It’s an Eco Spa E4, simple and effective. The spa vendors at the big home show in Sacramento wanted to sell us a tube large enough to hold a small rave party with 8-10 seats, a boomin stereo tied into the led light display….(no thank you)