This week Matt’s crew continued to work on our foundation.  They started the week with only a bit of formwork and rebar up and by the end of the week our entire basement walls are formed and ready to be poured early next week.

Monday evening we went out to see the progress from the day and we were pretty excited to see the formwork for the cast-in-place basement walls up.  Cameron’s my little adventurous construction guy – he always wants to hop out of the car with me and go check things out.  Here’s a pic and you can see that Spencer isn’t around (he’s hanging out in the SUV watching a show on Joel’s phone), and even Joel’s standing off to the side.  It’s probably for the best anyhow that Spencer isn’t bumming around the site right now – there’s tons of stuff he could get hurt on – nails, rebar, concrete, formwork, etc.  Every time I ask him if he wants to check it out he says, “Is the house all built?  No?  Ok, I’ll just stay in the car.”

Cameron always wants to check the progress out with me! Love it!

Not Cameron though – he always wants to walk around the site and see up close what’s going on.  I love it!  And he’s always asking questions so it’s fun to explain things to him.  Bring back your 2nd grade science fair days, because on Monday evening Cameron wanted to do an experiment.  Hypothesis: when you throw them, which object (a rock or a stick) will make the biggest hole in the mud coming from the well digging?  Cameron’s conclusion: the rock makes a deeper hole and a taller “splash”, but the stick makes a shallower but wider hole.  🙂  Such a cute kiddo!

Cameron’s experiment today – rock versus stick in the mud.

Here’s some other pictures from throughout the week…

Rebar at sunset – whata view!

A quick pic inside the walls at Spencer’s room.

At work it’s standard to have “safety moments” before each meeting…had to share this one.

Here’s the garage – it seems like such a waste that it’s all going to be filled in with dirt since we’re not having any living space beneath the garage. Cameron wanted to make it an indoor basketball court…there’s an idea!

By the end of the day on Friday it’s all formed and ready for the pour on Monday!

Drilling Update

The drilling is moving along too…they started the week at 210’ deep just having passed through some major rock last week and on Monday moved on to drilling through clay.  By the end of the week, they were at 340′ and still in clay.  Judging on the other wells on our street, I think they should hit water this week.  Cross our fingers!

Design Update

This week we had a quick decision that we needed to make. Matt called to talk about the windows on the side of the garage. He needed a place to put the electrical & gas meter, and plan a place for our hose bib. The logical place would be to put them on the side of the garage, but we have windows there. The only place the electrical meter could fit would be in-between the first two windows. I guess this could have been ok, but I think that it really would have looked weird to have had the meter stuck dead center in the middle of the windows – like it was some sort of feature. Probably the easiest decision would have been to just nix the windows on the side of the garage. But since that side of the garage is angled to face the road, I really liked the idea of having windows to add curb appeal. So we decided to push the windows together to create room for the electrical meter to the right of the pair of windows. It’s the same layout as what’s set up further down on the garage wall, so it looks good – and gives Matt enough space to work and place the utilities. It’s a small change, but I believe that thinking through even the smallest of details will makes a home look so much better.