Drilling the 48" deep holes for concrete piers for foundation.

So, how hard is it to drill 9 holes 48 inches deep with a two man auger? Apparently, pretty hard. Took a better part of the day and really wore us both out. It seems easy to just turn on the auger and let it go to work. We discovered rocks, roots and even buried barb wire all of which slowed us down and made the work harder. When the auger hit the tree roots, we ended up breaking them with an axe. Then we were able to dig further. When the auger hit a big rock below, we had no way to remove that rock. We ended up leaving the hole only about 3 feet deep and used rebar hammered another 2 feet in the ground to reinforce it. The hole that had 3 layers of barb wire—we did all we could, but in the end, could not get all the wire out and so again, used rebar to reinforce. Who puts barb wire in to the ground anyway? And WHY?

Digging footing holes with a two man auger.

So, though we were confident we’d be done with digging in the 4 hours that we had for the base price of the tool rental, in the end it took us about 6-8 hrs, (with no lunch breaks) to finish digging the 9 holes. Next day, we’d be pouring concrete. That should be easy, right? :)