Taking the Goal for Granite

For a short few months back in 2008, the great paved parking area that is one of the bonuses of this house (off-street parking on a quarter-acre downtown lot is a premium!) doubled as a basketball court. I had gotten a roll-away basketball goal and quite a few of us enjoyed it for a few months...until it suddenly disappeared.

Another feature of downtown living, perhaps!

Stored in the south parlour for just over a year is my new, much-improved higher-quality in-ground basketball pole and goal. It's a pretty nice one that I managed to snag on a terrific nearly-half-price sale. I had intended to make its installation part of the tasks for a new general contractor, what with all the stuff that still remains to be done and that I can't do myself. Because it would involve setting the base in concrete, which I've never really worked with, I figured it was just smarter and wiser to let a professional add it to his to-do list around the house.

My plan is to put it at the back of the parking lot, up against the back wall, roughly between these two trees:

But I'm tired of waiting. It's time. I broke open the basketball goal box, watched some YouTube videos on installing an in-ground system, and busted out my shovels and pickaxe and wheelbarrow. I knew that the gravel layer was going to be a monster, right at the edge of the parking lot, but elsewhere in the yard I'd found that it was manageable once I dug down to the clay.

What I did not anticipate is that just below the ground surface is a debris field from demolishing the house's original driveway. Whereas I have a spacious large parking area on the smaller of the two lots that make up my plot of land, the driveway originally was a narrow lane that cut straight uphill just to the left of the house. I mean, right next to the house.  I have precious few pictures of the house before the former owners started working on it, but here's one where you can see the driveway down in the lower left corner of this shot:

I had not dug down far (and it was hard-going!) when I hit something mighty solid, mighty hard, and mighty large. I've now got it mostly uncovered, but not yet extracted:

So I guess we can tell what they did with at least two of the granite wall capper/toppers that sat atop the retaining wall along the old driveway. And while I don't think this picture captures it nearly well enough, let me add that so far I've come across precious little clay, and a heck of a lot of packed gravel. This is quite the nightmare scenario, but I shall not be defeated.