Tomorrow, April 23, 2009, the concrete shows up to pour our new foundation. The crew has been amazing, under the house working every morning by 7:00 AM. For those of you keeping score, that means they'll pour the foundation tomorrow, let it set up over the weekend, strip the forms early next week and lower the house down onto the foundation sometime late next week. That will be a fun day to have the house actually back down on the foundation again. The washing machine is going right now and when it heads into the spin cycle the house will start to shake back and forth like we're having an earthquake. It will be nice the have the house back down on Terra firma again.The work crews have been just amazing. If we are able to get the house down early next week we will be almost a whole week ahead of schedule! That's almost unheard of in construction (from my personal experience anyway, but maybe that's because I do so much of my own work!) I'm going to be interested to see how much concrete goes into this monstrosity. We have three foot wide footings which is about twice as wide as you would normally see. The foundation wall are eight inches thick which is pretty normal, although six inches isn't unheard of either. The fireplace foundation is going to be a six foot by four foot tower about eight feet high. God help the poor soul who thinks they can lift this one again.
There is a lot of last minute calculating to make sure we've got all of the electrical and plumbing into the foundation that needs to be there. So much easier today that it will be tomorrow once the concrete is in place. Carson Benner from Cellar Ridge was over putting in a conduit for the water line and one for the power to the sump pump today. I've buried an extra sewer line just in case the city ever decides to move the line to First Street instead of having it flow under the houses of four of my neighbor's houses.
Once we got the sewer hooked up, the water running, and the heat turned on living here hasn't been all that bad. There's a hefty hike up to the front door from the sidewalk, but the temporary steps that Cellar Ridge put in are much better and safer that the old ones we use to have. The older ones were an amalgamation of different sets of steps all different heights and lengths. You had to really concentrate when you went up or down them. It will be exciting to get the wrap around porch going as well. I'm going to recycle some of the beams that we took out from under the house into the porch railing. The wood is vertical grain fir, and it's beautiful. Well that's the update for now. The washing machine is in spin cycle, and I need to get our of the house before I get sea-sick.