If you've never actually used an excavator, front-end loader, or any other large equipment, you'll really never know how satisfying it can be. They are powerful equipment that can move a lot of dirt in a short amount of time, but only if you're good at it. It takes skillz to do things fast and smooth in a way that's not going to tear up the equipment or injure someone. Crane operators are impressive too. Watching crews keep tonnes of load under control flying through the air and placing it down softly (while sometimes not in line of sight of the operator) is impressive to watch. Why more people are not fascinated/impressed with it is beyond me. I think people assume it's all automated and a cushy job and do not realize how much manual control is required. Kind of like those "I could build it in a weekend" comments discrediting the amount of work someone else did.

▲

mothballed 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It definitely takes skill to do operate excavator/front-end loader / backhoe etc with any amount of efficiency, but if you don't care how slow you are you can do pretty much any residential task anybody else can do almost right off the bat and it is definitely a blast.

I dug the footings for my house on my first day ever on a backhoe, the next day I removed a few trees and built a road, then I rented an excavator and did all my underground electric in one weekend and underground water main in another. All with no experience with any large machinery nor any electrical or plumbing experience, so the weekend comments can definitely be incredibly valid.

▲

dylan604 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I've seen crane ops lower the hook onto someone's head (wearing a hard hat of course) so gently they barely felt it. Construction crews do goofy things when they're slow and bored. You're not doing that kind of thing after a weekend of playing around. Watching a team signaling an operator that has no line of sight with nothing but hand signals is impressive for both people. But like anything in life when you see someone really good at their job to the point it looks easy can give people the wrong impression. In your weekend, you probably had favorable conditions. Try doing that when it's the day after pissing down rain, or in the build up when the winds are 30mph. Similar when people watch PGA players chip onto the green and roll the ball within inches of the hole thinking it looks so easy when they do it, but you're not making that shot with a weekend of golfing.

▲

mothballed 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not downplaying how good those people are at their jobs. Only pointing out it looked hard to me until I did it, then when I realized how easy it was so long as I took my time, I started renting construction equipment all the time. I have no idea if the conditions were 'perfect' or not -- I was building a house in a remote desert location with conditions ranging from dry and balmy to monsoons.

After a few weekends I definitely don't think I'd ever consider hiring someone for any ground equipment too simple to do yourself if you have the time. Cranes might be a different story (I've moved multi million dollar equipment after a few hours on warehouse overhead cranes, as did practically everyone else in the company, but not the freestanding ones), but not sure because I used rafters instead of trusses so I could just carry all the roof stuff up in single sticks as renting cranes without an operator doesn't seem to be possible here.

Takeaway here is homeowner can probably do everything as long as they use rafters instead of trusses, to compensate for potential issues with the crane.

▲

bluGill 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When I built houses we used an all-terrin forklift to lift the trusses. Probably too late, but if you do it again. Building without a forklift is too hard. We did use a crane for one job - there was no room for a forklift. It took 3 people to keep an experienced crane operator busy. They move fast.

cement is one job I would be careful of. You can do it yourself but there cannot be breaks or mistaves as cement is curing and losing strength all the time.

▲

mothballed 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There are a lot of breaks and mistakes in my concrete foundation. And I poured about 300 bags of quikrete, mixed one by one, eyeballed with water in a portable electric mixer -- would probably give a civil engineer a heart attack. Fortunately there is no frost heave and rarely freezes, so im mostly relying on just having enough compressive strength which has about a 100x safety factor on my wood frame.

The breaks are tied together with rebar, the mistakes on top were mortared level when starting my run of blocks for the foundation. Got pretty much perfectly level by last run of blocks.

Ghetto? Maybe, but a civil engineer friend said he did cold joints same as I, and the house has held up so far....

▲

dylan604 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Being from a construction family that did commercial high rises, I learned more about concrete testing than I cared to know. The plans will call for a specific type of concrete mix with a specified amount of rebar. Those plans will be based on how much weight the floor is meant to support, and has specific ratings. When they make the pour for the actual building, they will also pour multiple test slabs of the same thickness and rebar. The test slabs will be put under pressure to test their fail point. One slab is tested 24 hours after pour, the next 48 hours, and however many they do based on the plans. The longer it cures, the stronger it gets. They cannot put weight on it and move to the next floor until it has cured to the correct minimum set. My dad would walk away in shame at what you just described, and I can hear him muttering about it in my head.

	▲	mothballed 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There were no building plans lol, but bear in mind, it's a 1 story light frame wood structure with an average gravity/vertical load of less than 10 psi on the poured concrete part of the foundation, so nowhere near the demand of a skyscraper. I am basically pushing my concrete to 1% of theoretical limitations, never freeze cycling it, and cold joining it exactly how my civil engineer friend did in rigorous commercial project (when asked about this he laughed, large commercial projects usually need breaks because it's too big to do one continous pour, i simply applied same technique) . Let the unpaid contractors mutter from outside my DIY walls... if they stop standing it's more likely a wildfire than the hand mixed concrete.

▲

8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲

ooterness 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you've ever wanted to try this, I highly recommend "Dig This" in Las Vegas. They'll teach you the basics and then put you in a an excavator or bulldozer, with an open course full of big heavy things to move around. It's great fun.

https://digthisvegas.com/

▲

Waterluvian 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Renting a skid steer for a long weekend and getting kinda good at it was deeply satisfying. Also that experience of digging a hole for hours, and then using a scoop to dig the same hole in seconds, and it feeling like you’re digging through jello.

▲

10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]