Week 2C-3C: Grading

If you’ve been wondering why there have been no updates as of late it’s because we’ve been moving at a breakneck pace over at the jobsite.

Since the last entry almost a month ago the dirt has been flying and we’ve managed to smoothly excavate the hillside in order to provide the pad for the house. We had some small delays in the beginning, but we’re still ahead of schedule and are now into the foundation phase of the project.

The first week began with a delay because our grading inspector wanted an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) permit for the job since our excavations were over 5’-0” in height and our grading sub found out that you can no longer pull job-specific excavation permits so he had file for his annual permit. OSHA regulates excavations like the one on our job in order to insure worker safety. While safety is most certainly a critical part of any project CAL OSHA is notoriously slow (glacial to be exact) in issuing permits and they are equally notorious for being indecisive at what is required for a specific job. It’s true bureaucracy in action and it’s probably why so many projects ignore the permit requirement. Our delays with OSHA killed about a week, but our inspector came back and we happily handed him the annual permit. Moral of the story: If your project has excavations over 5’-0” or the permit requirement comes up in plan check, my advice is to make sure your grading sub has the annual permit in place to avoid delays.

The debris barrier is constructed of 3” dia. ½” steel pipe driven into the bedrock. The cribbing as it’s known is just sheets of ¾” plywood. As you’ll see we managed to make this temporary shoring work for us and it supported our spoils from grading with no problems.