This picture is two days after the previous post, Aug, 18th. The footings for the house were poured, but not the shop. Rebar was installed to support and attach the foundation walls.
The pumper truck was cool. The back end is loaded with wet cement, and it's pumped through the arm/hose to be put where its needed. The driver has a remote control attached to his belt and he walks around the site as the cement guys fill the forms, making adjustments to the flow and the arm position as needed. Not much different than filling buckets with a water hose. Sid said it sure beats using a wheelbarrow as he did years ago!
Virginia brought the kids out, and I brought my mom, so they could all see the progress. Erin in particular thought the excavator is cool. Sid has corrected me several times that it is NOT a backhoe! Apparently it's only a backhoe when there is also a front loader.
The shop did not have footers yet, so we put the kids in the trenches to run around. They had fun down there for much longer than I expected. The trenches brought to my mind the scene in "The Silver Chair" (Chronicles of Narnia) when they found the trenches in the hillside that later turned out to be letters carved into the ground.
Not easy to get a good shot of a moving object. Sami's favorite activity of the day was spinning in my hammock chair. LOTS of spinning! I didn't get a picture of Erin's fun, but Sid taught him to use a thick stick to smash large clods of clay. What's better fun for a 3yo boy than smashing things with permission?
We don't know why our site went un-worked-on for several days, but before the crews came back, it rained. A lot. A whole summer of drought, but we dig the trenches and they get turned into wading pools. Know what? Water does not quickly drain out when the ground is solid, well-packed clay.
On the bright side, the rain also got our water tanks half-full. Now, a couple more storms later, they are full to the brim.
One day while checking on the water level in the trenches, I came across this lady crossing my trail. Apparently she's an "oil beetle". So named because if you upset them they discharge an oil that will burn your skin. This particular one has a greatly extended abdomen full of eggs; she's about 1.5" long overall. They also come in green and purple, so I'd love to see those too! Definitely one of the prettiest bugs I've ever seen!
After weeks of waiting, the ground finally dried out enough to get trucks back onto our site. Last Thursday, Sept 9th, the shop footings finally got poured and the forms were set up for the house foundation walls. We found this part to be interesting. The forms are huge metal "boards", mostly in 3ft widths but also 1ft, 6in, and 2in, to ultimately get the needed distances. They are held together by large nail-like connectors that fit into 1" holes on the edges. Two walls made the inner and outer sides for each poured foundation wall, and the thickness of the foundation was kept consistent by thin slips of metal held by the connectors and between the individual "boards". They had notches in the middles to hold the re-bar inside the cement. Brackets attached around the outside hold boards that do dual duty as stability to keep the wall straight, and provide a ledge for the workers to stand on as they fill the forms with cement. The places where the water pipes will pass into the house were held open by large pipes placed under the footings which the water hoses/pipes will easily pass through.
As of Friday the 10th, the forms were set for the entire house and most of the shop. Today when I arrived at lunch time, this was the view from the campsite.
The workers were finishing up pouring the walls of the shop, and they completed the house by the end of the workday. There were gaps left in the upper foot of the walls for the garage doors and service door. The long braces such as seen here at the upper center of the pic brace the walls into the proper, straight, position.
This is a small example of heavy trucks vs. new driveway. This is AFTER repair work and additional gravel, and just from one visit by one truck. While we waited through the rainy days, the hilltop was a major mess, with deep ruts and puddles that wouldn't drain. Today, one of the excavator's crew was there with a skid-steer, keeping the driveway groomed and cleaning it all up at the end of the day. I asked him how all the movement and mixing of the clay and gravel would effect the finished driveway, and he assured me that in the long run it will make the driveway firmer. He also told me they would be doing the back-fill on Friday, most likely. Altogether, an entire month between the digging of the footings to the backfill, which was only about 6 days of actual work.
No comments:
Post a Comment