Cabin Site Preparation - Installing Piers 2

I'm still in shock over what we have been able to accomplish.  As we make progress, I start to realize how long this would have taken with my plan to do it myself with hand tools and renting an auger.  

When we left the day before, we had 12 of the posts complete leaving only 12 more to do this morning.  I arrived a little early to meet the electric company as I'd called them to evaluate adding service to my property.  They gave me a few options and stated they would send me a plan by email in a few days.

Shortly after the electric company left, my dad arrived and we started up on our third and final day of work.  After refining our plan over the past two days, we made quick progress digging the holes and installing the piers.

All of the piers are at least 20" in the ground but the posts along the front are deeper (~24").  The back holes were hard to get deep because we kept hitting really hard clay.  However, I though was that if we could not dig any further with the weight of the skid steer on the auger bit, the hard packed clay should be enough to hold the cabin well.

We moved at a rate of four posts per hour which was pretty good.  It was hard to get the 8" auger centered exactly so I ended up using a post hold digger to clean out the holes and line them up so all the posts were installed in a straight line.  Our pace slowed incredibly on the last hole when we encountered two very large roots.  We suspect they were part of the trees we removed as the back of the cabin is now where the trees were at but we were able to remove enough that the bottom of the post was on a firm footing.

We stood back and admired the work for a while and then decided to start putting up some of the tools we had laying everywhere.  My dad leveled out the land a little more and I started using a small disc he had to break up the top soil where he had driven the skid steer.  I was able to drive between some of the post but not all of them.  Where I could not go, I used a small rake to level out the ground around the piers.  As I finished leveling the ground, my dad threw out some rye seed he had in hopes that it would sprout and help hold the loose dirt in place over the winter.

The following pictures show the state of the land as we were leaving at the end of the day.