Friday, October 9, 2009

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment