Well people,, yesterday was one truly challenging day.
The mission was to transport a shed 5 miles from an open field that was saturated in too many areas. I hired a father and son team that were truly, truly a team I was proud to work with. The first task was for them to find this off the beaten path location. Once on site, they had to figure out how to enter and exit the field without getting stuck in the mud. The shed was about fifty feet off the old blacktop road but with the ground starting to thaw, you might as well as thought you could walk on quicksand. They inched their truck towards the shed skids and figured out how they were going to break loose the 5 foundation skids that had sunk and was frozen into 3 inches of mud. The truck, once loaded would sink about 12 inches. Once the shed base was free from it's icy base, it was slowly winched up onto the trailer. It became evident real quick that, once loaded, this trailer and shed, was not going to float across the mud that separated it from the main road. I called my neighbor who is the local well digger. He showed up with a heavy duty work truck loaded down with thick rubber diamond deck mats. After about an hour of placing mats and hooking up chains and cables,, the trailer and shed were once again on blacktop. Now for the 5 mile trip to my backyard. I led the way, with emergency flashers on. That was the easiest part of the job. My neighbors had given me permission to use their driveway and lawn to drop the shed on a gravel pad I had installed on my back lawn. This is where more problems arose.
Their driveway is gravel and their backyard is normally pretty dry and solid. Well, it wasn't that way yesterday. The driver had to use 4 wheel drive to get up the driveway and that's when the trailer started to cut some nice deep ruts. Now we had to cross the lawn and the next two hours entailed the placement of 4 x 8 foot,, thick and heavy rubber mats. It was a truly happy moment when that shed slid off the trailer and onto the gravel pad. With the weight of the shed off the trailer, it was so much easier to get the truck and trailer back over to the driveway. Then we had to load up the mats and get off my neighbor's saturated property. I will order 20 tons of gravel today which will more than compensate for the ruts in the driveway. Man, I am so glad I ended up hiring this father / son team. They had plenty of reason but just wouldn't quit.
I had no problem adding a one hundred dollar tip to the cost of the job.
