Saturday, June 14, 2014

Week 3: Digging the foundation!





The location of our house is now officially excavated and set in stone (or at least, the crawlspace is full of stones, and the foundation is about to be set in concrete!).

I’m starting to get quite proficient with a shovel, despite the incredibly rocky and unconducive-to-hand-shoveling soil we’ve got here! I sure never saw this many rocks in Kansas soil!
Hand-shoveling around the caved-in edges with my newly purchased shade hat!




     Strings marking out the rough edges of the house: this is a prime example of why we had some 16-hour work days. Choosing the exact position where our house will sit was quite an important step. Some people might be able to look at the access road (or loop in our case), and throw the corners of the house site at a roughly perpendicular angle, and call it good – but not us! No, we had to line up a string along the front edge of the house, and make small, minute adjustments to it as we analyzed the angle from all sides of the property. After all, the angle has to look good driving in from the first curve in the road, and from the loop, and from our trail coming up the hillside, and from the front yard! And of course, we had to make sure that no edge of the house would be within 100ft of our yet-to-be-drilled well, and that there would be enough room for the septic tanks and drainfield behind the house.

     Here’s a timelapse video of one of the evenings we spent trying to figure out what angle we wanted. And notice our clever resourcefulness in figuring out how to make the line of the house more visible: it was a little difficult to discern minute changes looking at just a hot pink line of string J So we put up a board of plywood, and then added our outdoor table which has a nice 3D dimension to it for help in visualizing. J




Next post:  Updates on Weeks 4 & 5, getting the foundation ready to pour.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Remember, being a perfectionist is not necessarily a good thing!! It can really slow you down!! But it DOES make for a great finished product.