Stumped!?

28 Aug Stumped!?

A patio installation job bracketed our recent vacation, which was good news for the quality of the finished product- we found a huge stump that needed to be removed.  Building a patio over a tree stump, no matter how recently the tree had been cut will only lead to heartache as the roots rot and the ground settles.  The stump had to go. Fortunately the guys on my crew are strong, stubborn and driven.  The stump had no chance for survival.

before patio

just begun

The correct process for removing a stump on a worksite where there is no easy access to bring our excavator is to dig around the stump by hand and chop the roots into bite sized pieces with an axe.

digging under stump

Simple as that!

chopping stump

Get some good access to the stump

gravel infill

Hack away bit by bit. Infill with crushed rock.  I like to use a blend of clean crushed 5/8 quarry rock with a bedding of 1/4 minus mineral rock.  Its a proprietary blend that gives us excellent results.  We use the “mechanical animal”compactor.  We hate the thing when it comes to loading and unloading it, its somewhere north of 350 pounds.

leveling and compacting gravel

We love it when it comes to compacting soils which leads me to the part I mentioned at the beginning, how it was good we broke for vacation.

We compacted the soil one more time after having let the ground rest for a week, and the area where we had removed the stump had settled just just a little bit.

after patio

Here’s a detail of a portion of the finished product from about the same viewpoint of the first picture.  See the block wall behind the guys?   Its the same wall in this picture.