Changes

In the midst of all the work we are doing, the changing of the seasons keeps moving on. We can't hold a candle to New England, but I look forward to seeing these color changes from our porch!

In the "changes" theme, it is starting to feel like that old David Bowie number... when we dug the basement, first we moved it 5 feet north because of the septic field encroaching on the home site, then the foundation guys recommended we move it back a few feet... remember the picture of the tree stump at the corner of my bedroom? It might be a few feet off....
This is a photo of the footings for our basement. The first step will be to pour the footings (ie the first layer), then wait for the inspection, then pour the walls of the basement. This is, after all, earthquake county, so the foundation has to accomodate future earthquakes.

Lest we think that this is all work and no play, here is a picture of James and the kids clowning around. Notice the log Patrick is standing on: this was supposed to fall elsewhere, but given the broad empty space (nature abhors a vacuum, you know), it of course had to fall where James didn't want it too...

King of the Mountain!

OK, so this is my attempt at an artsy photo of the local foliage. It was positively beautiful with blue sky earlier in the afternoon, but I thought this intensity of red still deserved some attention!

James was finishing the dirt work for the foundation this weekend. This is a picture of Katie walking between some of the dirt piles; the house/basement is to her left, and there is a huge mountain of fill dirt to her right. I can only imagine what this will look like once it starts raining; we have been SO blessed with dry weather lately. The piles of dirt are huge, at least 20-30 feet high. James had 2 friends helping today (Dave and Richard), who were SO helpful hiking up and down the dirt piles and laying down plastic. Most of what James has been trying to do this weekend is to lower the garage to the same level as the house (as of Friday the garage was at least 5 feet higher than the front porch). We would love to offer "free fill dirt", but we don't know how much we will need on site. I guess we'll have some big mud piles.

Tomorrow, Monday, was supposed to be the day we started pouring the foundation, however, the rental excavator (see photo above) broke its track (which means it is so broken that no vehicles can get past it, up to the homesite, to do any work), so the foundation guys can't get up there, since there is a piece of broken machinery in the way. We'll keep you posted...

Basement is almost dug

To get ready for the heavy construction trucks (such as the concrete truck to pour the foundation), we have to lay down a road, or at least some gravel, so the trucks don't founder in the dirt and mud. The foreground of this picture is the logging landing, which was laid 2 years ago and can support heavy machinery. The driveway goes up to the left to the home site, and until now was just a swath cut in the dirt. We had a load of rock delivered to cover the driveway (leading up hill to the left of the photo), but the delivery truck couldn't get up the hill to dump the rock, so dumped it at the foot of the hill where we get to spread it up, using the excavator.

In the foreground on the left is a stack of beams for the house, cut from our own trees. Greg (of Greg's Mobile Saw Mill, father of Gregory who ran the mobile mill, see previous posts) was up today to grade the wood. (By code, we can't use ungraded wood to build the house). Grading is based on number of knots, how dense the rings are, and how straight the timbers are. All the wood in the pile received either top or near top grade, more than adequate quality to use for the house. We are so proud to use wood from our own land to build the house.

Friday 10/09/09 after work: James and Weldon have almost finished digging out the foundation. The picture above is the east end of the foundation, where there is a crawl space under those rooms; James is walking around the edge, to give you a sense of scale. On the right is the drop-off to the full basement under the center part of the house (I posted a picture last week of the kids in front of that basement wall, as it was being dug). The weather has blessedly been sunny and we're keeping our fingers crossed for a little more dry weather. Once it starts raining this construction site will get a lot muddier! We expect the foundation crew to be up Monday to start putting up forms.

Digging the basement

Today and yesterday (the weekend), James hired a fellow who is quite expert at excavating, to help dig the basement. Weldon is his name. The guy is amazing; at the speed he digs, rotates the excavater to dump the dirt, and rotates back for the next shovel-full, I'm amazed he isn't dizzy (reminds me of the spinny rides at the fair last month!). James will be cleaning up the mess for the next 2 days.

This is a picture of Katie (wearing a bathrobe for warmth, it is 60 degrees out on this fine Northwest fall day) standing in the future basement, pointing to the east wall. It's a pretty amazing piece of excavating. You can see the scrapes from the excavator behind her, it's very hard stuff.

It's official!

We are now officially a construction site: we have a Porta-potty. Since we will have other construction persons on site as of Monday (ie other than James, who apparently didn't need facilities), we needed "facilities". I guess James was fine with the trees. We had some interesting contests about who would be the first to christen the Portapotty (no names, they will remain anonymous...)

The last tree on the home site, the one with the orange tape around it, came down today: the tree at the SW corner of the house was dropped; the stump is in the photo at the top above. That tree has been marked for over a year. This truly is a landmark event!

We had some "house guests" this afternoon: Colleen with daughter Carol and son Chase came by to drop Patrick and Katie off. They live on property also (farm land, mostly), and Chase (age 3) is a HUGE fan of tractors and all things John Deere. Imagine his excitement seeing the excavator!

Re-marking the house

Here are Katie and Patrick in the (broken) excavator last weekend while we were waiting for the repair. What an amazing boy-toy for James (also an incredibly destructive piece of equipment). The rental company finally brought a replacement equipment for us yesterday.

See our last post, when Patrick and Becky staked out the boundaries of the house. When we all went back the following day (with a better compass), we realized that the hemlock tree that seemed to be in the middle of the garage was actually BEHIND the garage (although it still needed to get come down). The settings were actually only a few feet off... but we had a huge slash pile that was right over the front porch, which made it tough to mark the corners of the house (I wish I had a picture of Patrick teetering on top of a 15' slash pile trying to "move over 2 feet" to line up with the compass settings and mark the corner).

James and Becky met with our building consultant (Dan Rayburn, of U-Build-It franchise) yesterday to review the progress. His first comment about the site was something along the line of "you guys have a LOT of dense growth (biomass/trees/undergrowth - I forget the exact words he used)". He made some suggestions on where to pile the debris so it would be out of the way, in preparation for DIGGING THE FOUNDATION and starting the building process! Yippee!

Keep your fingers crossed that our Indian Summer holds for a little longer so we can do some digging before the hillside turns into a muddy mess.