It's been a bit since my last construction blog, but unfortunately there's not too much to catch up on. We closed on the loan as planned in the last blog and pretty much immediately had footers after that. Not a bad start, right?
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Garage footers
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Front porch and other miscellaneous house footers
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Dev leaving her mark on the footers
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A big rainbow over a port-a-potty is pretty much a perfect analogy for the whole process leading up to breaking ground.
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| Champagne party to celebrate our footers |
Then we got lots of block delivered. On our old house, our basement walls were poured concrete. For whatever reason, Phillip decided to go with block for the foundation/crawlspace walls on this one (for one reason, the walls are about five feet shorter). I realize block is a lot less expensive than poured concrete, but it takes FOREVER, and as you'll see below, they've got a little work to do to convince me this method is just as good as the poured concrete.
Even though this house won't have a basement, the walls will be pretty tall due to our need to raise the house quite a bit to comply with our floodplain development permit. They started building the garage walls and left a hole in the front so they could get a Bobcat in to spread gravel when the time came for that.
When they were about finished with the garage walls, they moved over and started on the house walls to get out of the way of the rock-spreading activity in the garage. It was just prior to this point that I left for South Carolina to spend two weeks "working from home" on Seabrook Island. Ben had grand plans for them to have the first floor laid down by the time I got home. Spoiler alert: that did not occur. 😆
Although Ben is not much on picture-taking, he obliged me and complied with my requests to take progress photos while I was out of town so my blogging wouldn't suffer.
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Rock truck cavalry is here!
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That's a lot of rock.
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When I got home, I was pretty excited to go check out the progress (after watching my football game, of course). This is what I saw:
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This pic doesn't really do justice to the height of these walls or just how much rock is in there. This is the garage.
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Walking around the back side of the garage to the river side of the house
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View from the back porch isn't too shabby. We need to clear out a few more trees/bushes to open it up to the river a little more, but I like the height of the porch. And you can hear the water, which is lovely.
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This is Sugar, one of our neighbors' dogs and our little construction mascot. All of the contractors love her.
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Standing on the back porch looking down into the house. The front porch is the part filled with gravel on the opposite side.
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| Standing on the back porch looking towards the garage |
We were just about finished with our walk-around when I saw THIS:
Oh. Damn. Yep, that's the front wall of the front porch breaking off at the corner, either due to the pressure of all the rock inside it without corresponding backfill pressure on the outside, or due to the massive amount of rainfall that we apparently got over the past few days (maybe adding water pressure to the rock pressure), or possibly due to some other factor that I don't understand. In any case, Ben sent Phillip a "clean-up on Aisle 12" message, and I'm sure this is going to cost us additional time and money, which I always love. I'm also currently driving Ben crazy with my requests for assurances that these daggone walls are actually going to be stable and not crumble under our house at some point. Maybe this isn't a big deal and I'm being overly dramatic, but I feel like this is a big deal.
So...stay tuned.
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