Arcady Tractor Works and Arborculture

I had an interesting phone call the other day, and I thought I'd drop a note about it here. I recently put an estimate in on a tree removal. During the initial phone conversation the gentleman that he was a contractor and he understood that price isn't everything and that you get what you pay for. Well I didn't hear back on the job and happened to be by the site and saw that the tree was down and stumps were out.

I think this is self explanatory

As many people know I do a quite bit of plumbing in my off season. As a part of that I have been training with a solar heat manufacturer and will hopefully start my first installation shortly. Believe it or not in the Hudson Valley we can get as much as 60% of our annual hot water needs from solar energy. The systems typically cover themselves in 8 to 10 years and have a minimum life expectancy of 25 to 30 years. You can couple the system to radiant heat and cover as much as 35% of your total home heating bill for the year.

So the job here was straight forward enough, a long standing customer of Stryker Electric contacted Scott (thats Scott in the gray shirt holding up the garage) with a power problem. Something or the other was without power, that is not really my side of things, but it turns out the buried service line had been over-loaded and burned up. Because of a sizing issue, the existing wire could not be pulled from the conduit and a new service had to be buried. Thats where I came in. Straight forward enough, dig a trench, and then fill it in.

I got a chance to plow and disc today, and it reminded me of how much I love field work. Seven straight hours on the  tractor, and the field is ready to be worked. Nice soil, a few rocks but over all not to bad. It had been fallow a while so the sod always makes for a tough go of things, but what is left of it (the sod) will be either gone by the time they plant, or picked out and composted during the bed prep. I'll get some pics on it hopefully by the weekend.

Of course I don't have any "befores" it is seemly against some law of the universe that I can not take a picture before I start the equipment up! Thankfully, the before the pictures here, this are was just black top so it is pretty easy to imagine. Powers Auto, in Red Hook, needed an area of parking lot removed so that they could plant trees and grass. We looked at things and determined that matching the width of the new grass to the width of the grass on the other side of the sidewalk would be the best option aesthetically, so thats what we did.

So the job here was to take down this garage, which was a bit of a safety hazard. Demolition is one of best big kid type of jobs, it is really hard to do it wrong, and you get to break stuff. After the tear down and a 30 yard dumpster they now have a nice back yard... they should put up a garage or something ;)

So here was a nice little project complements of that massive rain and flooding of a couple of weeks back. This grate was set on hand laid blocks, which served well for years. But with time, and the severity of the rains, the hand laid basin collapsed out from underneath the grate you see and it is being held in place by the blacktop. Good thing they found it right away and were able to block off the area before someone parked in it. What you can't see in the picture is that the grates has sunk about 5" and will not support any weight.