Mattjohndeere2
Active Member
I'm not nearly as experienced as a lot of the folks here but I'll agree with a couple points... With that budget, assuming it's for machines only, you can get a pretty good used backhoe and rent a sizable excavator for a few weeks and take care of a lot. The backhoe will continue being useful for a long time and the excavator can take care of your trenching and tree removal. If you have time you'll be amazed at what you can do with a backhoe, but like @Spud_Monkey said you'll learn to be creative also. You'd likely have about $10k leftover to play with (maybe dump truck money) and lots of stuff done.
Some of this depends on lot size as well, how much road are you doing? If it's a lot hiring it out will be the way to go. Getting someone who knows what they are doing for a grading project will be worth a lot. You can do it with a backhoe but it'll take a long time to learn to do it well, when a dozer (with operator) can do it in a day or two. And you'll be happier with the dozers results.
Also, the folks above are well intentioned but experience means they know when a little bit of laughter says a lot about a project. Don't get discouraged but also don't get kicked in the pants by reality.
aighead has some good points here. I actually liked trenching with the backhoe a little better than I do the excavator, just was a little slower hydraulics and since my property is so flat, it was easier to keep a slight grade and not screw up my ditches.
The largest excavator you can usually rent without having to have your own insurance (atleast here in upstate NY where I am) is an 5-6 ton machine. It'll do a lot of work for you, but just isn't machine enough for the bigger stumps. My 8 ton excavator, on the big stumps like in one of my pictures above, takes me about 20 minutes to pop - i have to dig all the way around, and come at it from a lot of points prying (and praying) to finally get it to wiggle. Then its a lot of pull one side, pull the other, then backup and repeat to get it up and out of its hole so the dozer can take it away. You can rent larger 12-20 ton machines, however your money is much better spent on having someone show up that has that kind of machine and knows what they are doing. I still would lean towards buying a machine of that size, if your OK with getting efficient with it, and OK with the possibility of a large repair bill in the case something goes wrong.
And aighead hit the nail on the head with grading, I'm very glad I had the experienced dozer guy come in and put 3 inches of crusher on the driveway to finish it off, he really knew his grade, pitched it correctly, and I have not had even one pothole begin to form. I spent enough time on a dozer the past two summers to get very good at being able to do grade, but its easy to screw it up and the good guys can do it twice as fast as I can.