October 30th, 2019 Ready to begin building.

Things have been busy this month. This is a bit surprising since October is usually only good for clean-up projects (like clearing out the Summer annual plants). We had quite a bit of dog business: we had a litter of pups and bought two new breeding stock girls. But the most of what we have been doing involved getting dirty.

Since the 9th (my last post) we have been working on the trenches for the new Farmhouse foundation. It has been slow and heavy going. It took five days to prepare the site for digging, then two days to dig everything out using a rented excavator. We had things laid out pretty well, but the newness of using the tools added a bit of time to the project. All in all I spent nine hours digging, but we got the trenches started and dug a long slit trench for the PGE power lines. Then things slowed to a temporary stop.

We had rain, lots of rain, for a week! Things got muddy, slippery, and everything got sticky. We did get the PGE trench inspected and buried on the first day of the rains, but that's about all the happened for a few days. The home site had to sit for a while so as not to destroy all of the work we had done.  But we got back to it eventually, clearing out some extra dirt and shopping concrete providers and such.

We had Jack over to help level the floor in the home site trenches. We rented a plate compactor to level out the dirt after carefully clearing and re-measuring the trenches. We had to add some rock to get the compactor moving properly because the mud is very sticky. but they looked really good at the end. This week we have used three days to put up "batter boards" to keep our string line measurements straight. Batter boards are 2x4s on fence posts, elevated to the floor height of the house, each one is situated to allow us to make and adjust measurements. They  keep the dimensions of the foundation constant so that when we stretch a string between any two points, we can check for accuracy while building concrete forms. Building a square house begins at the bottom and it's hard to build a square house on a crooked foundation, so preparations is key to getting this all right.

After we put up the batter boards we could finally check everything we had done well, and make adjustments. We had to finish cut the walls of quite a few of the trenches and clean it all up and make it work, but today we clean and square.

Finally ready to begin building the forms for the concrete foundation.