Excavation

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We went to St. John for spring break and made plans for groundbreaking on our property. We needed a large track hoe for this part of the excavation. After some research of the available equipment on the island and prices (All of which were EXPENSIVE), we went with Majestic.

There is a building going up below us and the site manager, named Mustache Mike, hooked us up with some contacts and before we knew how it happened, we had a large hoe cutting into our hillside for the driveway. At this point all we we're hoping for was not to hit blue bitch. If you run into that, your expenses just went up. The track hoe needs to be changed to a jack hammer fitting to break through. When this tool is put on the machine, all the excavators on the island charge an exta $100 an hour. Luckily, we didn't run into much of that.

Our biggest dilemma was what to do with the excess material that we were removing from the hill. The island had a soil dump site on the Coral Bay side at one point, but people were using it to dump all kinds of unnatural debris. Needless to say, the authorities shut it down. Now the only place to go was hauling it to the other side of St. John. Each trip took almost an hour round trip. There was also only one dump truck available at the time and it wasn't keeping up.

We started searching for solutions to the problem. Several people mentioned a local business man that had land for storage and a small dump truck for rent. The good news was that it was quicker. The bad news was that he charged us $75 a load to dump the dirt and the same amount again per load to haul it.