November 15, 2019 Success!

This biggest step in nearly any process is the one you take in beginning the work of whatever you planned to do. Our farmhouse permits and plans took over three years to complete; but this isn't the first step of building the farmhouse. Building a firm foundation of the house is the first firm step and there were many more elements to this than I had thought. The bottom of the house is where building begins, at the footing. But a whole lot of preparation started once the permits were in hand before the very first actual building can happen.

We had a siting plan but actually finding the place where reality of the Farm and the drawings we bought agreed was a bit of a problem. The front of the house runs exactly parallel to the road running in front of the property. We did this, and quite a lot of other things, to play with scale a bit. Showing the front of the house, full-on to the road, will make the house seem larger than it is. But finding a line which runs exactly parallel to the front fence took nearly an entire afternoon.

Once we knew where the house would go, we had to clear all of the topsoil away using our miraculous little tractor. I scraped down carefully, moving to good earth to other places where gardens and planting will be done later. Once we were down to relatively flat clay, we began marking out the lines of the footprint for the foundation. Since all of the is trial and error, it took a while to find the true size of the place and then make our marks square against each other. We put stakes out everywhere, then connected the stakes with string so that we could check it for square, then we painted lines on the dirt under the string so that we could work the dirt.

Eventually we found the foot-print of the house.

We rented an excavator to dig out our twenty-four inch wide trenches. I knew, from building our septic system last Summer, that it would be better if we didn't dig too deeply and disturb the soil under the foundation, so we bought a builder's laser level tool and carefully dug down a little at a time until we were within a few inches of our goal depth. We had to go back and finish the work by hand and shovel, but eventually we got the trenches looking good.

Next we staked up some semi-permanent boards around key points of the site so that we could put careful measurements on them and string lines over every vital place we needed to build foundation elements. This led us to make some adjustments which caused a bit more digging, but eventually we got it all figured out.

We built about two-hundred feet of somewhat simple wooden footing forms at the bottom of our trenches. and then carefully dug twenty-six square holes to support twenty-six posts, all of this exacting work.

Then the final step was to steel re-enforce everything with rebar and make sure everything remained exactly level. Everything we did, or bought, took time to figure out. Much of it had to be learned from the beginning. All of it took a lot of time, some of it dodging rainy days, but it all had to be done right.

Eventually we got the job done.

This morning the County Building Inspector came and approved our preparation work on the first pass. For us this was a bit of a nail biter, since we never did any of it before and were guessing a lot.

So today we  have finally arrived at the place in time where actual building of the house can take place. Early next week we will pump concrete into each hole and fill all of the forms, smooth everything out carefully, and make the base of our new house as flat as we can. From there all of the next steps should all become a bit easier.