Finish Grading
After the shovel finished, i needed to to bring in topsoil to flatten out the yard and give me a base that I could plant something. To figure out how much fill I needed, I needed a plan. But first, I had to determine where the grade was. Based on advice from a neighbor, Nick Kleinburg, I marked out the yard with stakes on a 25 foot grid. Then the elevation had to be taken at each point. From there we could figure out where we wanted to go, and how much fill it would take to get there.
The spot elevation plan looked like this:
From there we drew on contour lines
From this we figured that about 100 cubic yards of fill was needed.
The really good topsoil cost about $30 per yard. Fill dirt is $5 to $10, but it has rocks and other stuff also.