Since we are changing our plans and beginning with a mobile home, we now have to accommodate for such an arrival. This includes widening the entrance to our driveway and adding twenty four more feet of culvert along the roadside. Recently, we added sixteen more feet on the northern side of the culvert we already have.
In the photo above, you can see a few things. For one, some branches on the left side of that tree needed to be removed. Also, the twenty four foot culvert needed to be cut and then installed. All of this is pretty much new "work" for me, since I've never really done much like it before. However, with the decision to first place a mobile home on the property rather than immediately beginning to build, changes like this are necessary.
Rather than just bringing in a house piece by little piece and assembling it onsite, we are now going to attempt to move an eighty foot long and sixteen foot wide foot mobile home onto the property. This change will require a wider entrance to the driveway, so I got started on it!
One of the first steps in the process was digging out the spot for the culvert to be added. I'd done some of the finer work by hand, but the bulk of the labor was done with a backhoe attachment on a front end loader than one of my neighbors owns. He's let me borrow it many times, but for this one he actually did the work himself and helped teach me some additional things about the process and what goes into a project like this.
While he was preparing the ditch, I started by removing all of the rocks and dirt from inside the existing culvert. These can begin to fill and even clog over time, so with the additional length being added to it, I wanted to make sure that we were starting with a "clean slate." It took a while to crawl into this underground pipe time and time again with a pick-axe and hoe, but eventually I cleared it all out.
This next step in the process was an interesting one, and I certainly learned a lot while doing it. For starters, once we measured where we wanted our cut to be made, by neighbor placed some tape over the line to be cut. when cutting through metal a lot of debris and sharp pieces can be made, and cutting through the tape rather than straight through the metal made it much safer.
My neighbor does stuff like this all of the time, and his rough hands and thick skin can prove it. After he showed me the basic idea he let me have a go at it. The first thing that I did after trying it for a second was to stop and put on a long-sleeve shirt. The hot sparks of metal really burned, and while he may have been used to it I apparently was more tender.
The change in apparel certainly helped, but I also braided my goatee just to make sure it didn't start on fire. We ran through a few of these blades in the process, but in the end we wound up with two sections of culvert. One was sixteen feet long and was to be added to the downhill side and the other was eight feet long that we will add to the uphill side.
One important thing to remember when joining culverts like this is the angle. You can see my friend with a level in his hands here. The goal is to either keep the same degree of downward slope or perhaps even increase the angle. If this new section of culvert is not as steep, then dirt, rock, and debris will quickly build up at the bend and eventually fill the entire culvert, rendering it nonfunctional.
Couplers like this are one way to join two culverts. I've got another one on order for the uphill additional, but we were able to use the one that we had on hand to complete this portion. Once this piece is secure and the earth is packed around the culvert, everything should stay in place and function properly.
Burying the new section was also much easier with the backhoe attachment. I am so blessed to not have to rent equipment like this, and then even more so to have a kind neighbor willing to complete the more delicate and difficult tasks for me with it!
In this photo you can see that we are filling everything back in, but you should also be able to notice the difference in the tree. At this point I had already done some trimming on the necessary sides. While this tree is not exactly "needed," we'd rather leave it in place and let it grow, so I thought that we'd try a trim first and see if we couldn't keep it.
I'll finish up the other side once the next coupler comes in, but so far we are doing great and making progress. Hopefully soon we can get the mobile home on our property and hooked it! I'll keep you posted!
@papa-pepper and here's the proof:
proof-of-making-a-bigger-entrance
GIF provided by 
