Up Up and Away

The hilarious excavator that worked on our project predicted it. He said that he'd do all the dirty work for weeks to get the foundation in place and we wouldn't be excited but then the framers would come in, work for one day and get all kinds of credit and glory. Yeah, pretty much. 

Let me start by reminding you what things looked like when I left for work this morning...

And now look at it!! Up up and awaaaayyyyyyy!!!

Water Water Everywhere

It's pouring rain this weekend and our porch pit is turning into a muddy swimming pool!! What a mess.

Fortunately our contractor had the foresight to cover all of the freshly delivered lumber with tarps before they left for the weekend.

Hay Day

The excavators finished up today! They filled in all the areas around the foundation with dirt and covered the whole yard in hay. It looks a little silly but it's preventing everything from getting muddy.

The number of dirty dog prints on the carpet has significantly declined since the introduction of the hay so I'm all for it!

Lumber was supposed to have been delivered today with framing starting this week. Unfortunately we've had a delay since the lumber truck had a crane that our power lines would have interfered with. They'll try again tomorrow with a truck more appropriate for our city block.

Since the framers don't work on Friday, it will be Monday before much real progress is made :(. 

Weekend Warriors

The concrete guys worked over the weekend to get the forms removed so that the excavators can start working straight away on Monday! .

The pit will be gone and only the top of the foundation will peek above the ground. So I suppose by Tuesday everything will look pretty much the way it did when we started :)!!

Set in Stone

The concrete went into the forms today and the foundation of our new porch is set in stone! Well, it will be once it dries.

 

 

 

I really want to stamp all of the dogs paws into one of these big pools of cement! Jake said it probably wasn't a good idea though. He's probably right. I can just see them stampeding through the forms and ruining the entire thing!

 

 



 

We also had a field inspection by the city today. All is well. They reviewed and signed-off on the work performed by our structural engineer.

 

There are pages and pages of these crazy calculations. It's like Goodwill Hunting or something.

 

 

 

Oh and our light fixtures came today! I like them but they are bigger than I was imagining. We had originally planned to put one on each column but I think we'll reduce that to every-other-column instead. We'll see.



Fandemonium

Our contractor's office manager has been helping us get all of our finishings selected and ordered. I've been pretty good about sticking with the decisions we've communicated to her with the exception of our ceiling fan!

I'm sure I'm driving her nuts with my "order this", "cancel that", "I like this", "wait, no I don't like it after all", "I think I want this", "okay, order it, I think."

After all the back and forth, I promised her that I had made my final decision today! We're sticking with this fan... whether we like it or not!!

A Useless Yard

For the next several days, our yard will be entirely uninhabitable unless you happen to be wearing a tool belt. Concrete will go in tomorrow, the frames will come out the next day and on Monday, the giant pile of dirt will be pushed back into the pit - making the yard (somewhat) usable again.

When the excavation was done the contractor uncovered some issues with our foundation that needed to be fixed in order to bring our home up to code. We're glad it's being corrected but hoping we don't find too many more surprises throughout the project!

Progress is being made but it's coming at the expense of our sanity, dogs included.