I rented a mini bobcat (boxer) for the day. I had to remove a section of my fence to get in an out of the backyard.
At one point Dad had said we could do the digging by hand, but after 5 minutes with the mini bobcat (boxer), I decided I'll never try to dig things out by hand ever again.
My backyard slopes from the house down to the fence. When it was all said and done, we took out about 24 inches of dirt and piled it out on the street.
The machine wasn't that fast but got the job done. After getting a large pile of dirt on the street, we began to load Dad's snowmobile trailer with dirt and then take the dirt off by hand about a 1/2 mile down the road. We took at least 6 loads of dirt away and it appeared we didn't make much of a dent in the dirt pile.
One of my neighbors said he wanted the rest of the dirt and would bring home a bobcat, which we were grateful for.
We also took the grass/dirt/weeds off our west park strip and dug it down about 4 to 6 inches. This is in preparation of putting fist sized rocks there. The park strip is 6 feet wide and about 120 feet long. Watering a park strip is next to impossible and since most of the water doesn't get on the park strip but gets on the road. We decided it would be more efficient to have rock there instead of grass we have to mow and water. We still have a lot to do with both the backyard and the park strip, but we at least have the dirt dug out.
