First Pour Continued

The footings for the Front Porch room.
See the plank that we walk across to get in and out of the house.

JP's brother Matthew helped us.

Most important is to stay out of the way of the cascading and splashing concrete.

The finished footing with J bar coming out of the footing.

They also put bolts in the footing to hold the bottom of the forms in place when they pour the concrete walls. There is nothing to hold the inside concrete form close to the outside dirt wall.

It is kind of hard to get out of the front porch room.

See the finished footing on the west end of the porch and, over the small wall,

the finished footing on the front of the garage

First Concrete Pour

Saturday Morning.... Show Time.

The concrete truck was supposed to arrive at 10:00 am.

Just like Dad predicted. He showed up at 9:45am. We were almost ready for him.

The Whole Family Helps

Angela helped point the laser to determine the correct depth of footings.
Lee helped dig footings for kitchen add on.
JP helped dig too.

Jules drove grade stakes to show the level of the concrete in the footing, and James held the board for the laser to shine on.

(We think it is funny how James jumps every time Jules hits the rebar)

Lee and Dad worked together to cut the rebar to go in the concrete.

The footings under the front porch are dug and are ready for the rebar.

A couple of days ago, Dad saw a rodent digging in the side of the wall from the footing to under the eventual floor. Then, when we were all working to make the footing deeper, the rodent apparently decided that we were too close of neighbors and he was leaving. But we didn't know how he could get out of the hole. We could not agree on what to do with the rodent (probably a pocket gopher). Finally James got a big empty box (for a case of canned food) and brought it to catch the gopher. Dad caught it in the box. James taped the box closed and Mom said to go throw it away. Julianna informed James that, "No, you cannot recycle a gopher in a box."

Week Three ...Maybe?

the footings for the kitchen add on.

again

the footing holes

mom holding up the board to measure the depth

Jules pointing the laser at the board.

Cutting Doors from the Basement to the New Rooms

Its a good thing Dad checked now to see when we needed to cut the doorways through the concrete walls.
We had the doors cut out.

Digging the Holes continued

The hole under the garage is getting bigger.



The bobcat drives in and digs and drives back out.

He has cut a ramp going up (or down) the driveway to get from the room to the dump truck.

The hole is mostly done.

We have to dig the footings and straighten the dirt walls by hand.

JP is holding the stick that the laser level shines on to show us if our floor is low enough.

We put a string to show us a straight line for the outside of the wall.

We also hung a plumb string to get our walls vertical.

The many different layers of dirt are interesting.





The walls are starting to look pretty good.

Digging the Holes

The equipment is here and ready.
The dump truck will haul the dirt to a vacant lot that needs fill.
It is only a few blocks away from our house.

The bobcat is going to start the digging show.

Even though it is muddy, we will still dig.

The front porch room will be dug first.

About now is when they discovered the hidden footing.

He started to dig for the "under the garage room".

When he discovered that there was only this way out of the house and the front door,

he said he would try to leave some dirt by the door for a while longer.
Mom moved the Trampoline close to the kitchen window and took out the window screen.

Everyone was given permission to exit the house by jumping out the kitchen window onto the trampoline. It was kind of hard to get back in that way.

The bobcat dug down a ways and then ....

...left the rest of the digging under the front porch to the backhoe.

Then he started in the garage.

Notice it is not muddy in here.

After a day or two, the mud dried out.

We finished digging the garage on a sunny day.

The bobcat dug a ramp down the middle of the previous driveway.

He went in and out the ramp, taking dirt to the dump truck.

Things Start to get Messy

It started to rain.

When clay gets wet it sticks to everything.

It gets slippery.

As they started to dig the front porch, (which was covered by the roof),

they discovered another footing that was burried a foot or 2 below the porch.

It was too big to be broken up with a hammer drill,

so we had to rent another jackhammer.

This time, a 60 pound electric jackhammer.

The footing had to be broken up because it was too big to move out of there.

HOW BIG WAS IT?

It was SO big that it took a couple more hours of jackhammering to break it into pieces.

While removing the pieces of foundation,

the side of the bobcat scraped the aluminum siding off the front of the house.

This exposed where carpenter ants had eaten part of the house.

They scooped part of the foundation out of place and put it into the garage...

so they could break it up.

In the process of trying to break it into smaller pieces,

the bobcat scoop came up and smashed the garage door opener.