Updated views of the house

Here are some pictures showing more recent views of the north, west and south sides of the house. These are all from last weekend. Notice the tarps still on the roof. Once we get the porch posts standing and the porch roof system started those will be pulled off so we can finally finish the roof!

Dana and Dad are working to make sure all of the form board squares are just that...square. Lots of pushing and pulling to get the boards in just the right spot before they can be screwed.

Form Boards

Here's part of the form boards up on the north side of the house.

Bandit's always right in the middle of things with whatever random stick he can find. Usually it's some 2X4 that he's found laying around.

My beautifully dug hole. After we dug the hole and put up the form board, we went through and touched up the holes to make sure that they were exactly the same size as the form squares and made sure the corners were nicely squared off. It was a LOT of digging.

The measured, leveled and fully screwed together forms on the west side of the house.

Porch posts...again!

Memorial Day weekend. Always love having a long weekend. We thought about going camping with friends. You know, take some time to relax, sit in the sun, drink some beer. That didn't happen. Instead we spent all day Saturday digging holes around the remaining two sides of the house. We measured for all of the squares, painted our lines and got them all dug. Then we started building the forms for these sides.

We had to put up some of our batter boards again, since they had been run over many times with various pieces of equipment. We ran our string lines, measured every which way and made sure everything was level.

Then we got to drive stakes in everywhere to make sure none of our boards moved.

Filling in low spots

We put a couple of dump trailer loads of dirt on the north side of the house. It took quite a bit of dirt to bring it up, and even then we were still lower than we wanted to be.

There's Bandit again, we still couldn't get him out of that trailer! I think he really likes to lay on the cool dirt. Luckily with the dump trailer we didn't have to do too much shoveling, but some of the dirt stuck in there. It was still really damp.

Here's where we built up the dirt around the forms that sat so high off the ground.

You can see here just how soupy that side of the house was. With so much rain it never dried out and that's the main road to the back yard, so everytime we drove over it, it just got worse and worse. It's been a couple of weeks now since we've really had any rain, so it's dried out quite a bit since then.

Moving mountains

The north side of the house is much lower than the south side. Below is a picture of the forms that we built for the front (east side) of the house. As you can see, when we made it to the north side, the forms were quite a ways from the ground. We decided that before we built the forms on the north side we would bring in some dirt to make things easier. On the east side we had to figure something out so the concrete wouldn't go everywhere, so we built up the holes with sheetrock and then piled dirt up around it. We had a couple little blow outs, but nothing too major. But, we thought we'd make it easier on ourselves the next time around.

The very back yard was really uneven, so Dana stole dirt from the high spots. Thank goodness for tractors!

Bandit always wants to go along for a ride, you can't keep him out of that trailer. I don't think he thought it was so fun once the trailer was filled with dirt! He got himself un-buried though and then just walked all over the top of all the dirt.

More concrete - 2nd side of house

A couple weekends ago we poured concrete for the porch posts on the south side of the house. I had to work part of the day...had to give a presentation at a first time home buyers workshop. Fun! So my contribution to the work that day was to cut and tie rebar. There are 28 (?) porch posts around the house. We had already finished the ones on the front of the house, obviously. So before I went to work I made 6 more squares of rebar for the holes that Dana and Dennis were going to pour that day. When I came home I made the remaining 13, to try to get ahead of the game a little bit for the next pouring weekend.

Dana and I had dug the holes for the concrete one night after work that week and then the next night he and Leonard built the forms, which is no small job. It made it easier for pouring day, as all the guys then had to do was mix and pour the concrete.

We've been using Leonard's concrete mixer, which is great because we can pull it to right in front of the hole, mix the concrete and then try to dump it right in the hole. Of course it can't be just that easy though, so we had to build a wooden chute to catch the concrete, and then use a shovel to get it all in the hole. It takes about two full mixes to fill up one hole.

Here's Dana and Dennis smoothing out the tops of the concrete before it fully dries. One more side down! Only two to go!

Concrete...

I realize I'm a little behind on my posting for the house so here are some pictures of the porch posts on the front side of the house. We spent a day stripping off the forms and cleaning them up so they can be used again. There's still 3 sides of the house that need concrete poured! The concrete has metal strapping and rebar set in it to stand the logs up on to start building the porch. We poured 9 of these along the front.

Spring is finally here! Lots of flowers blooming in the yard and all of the trees have leaves back on them! Must mean that summer's coming and the rain will stop!