Fallen way behind again but catching up!

Some pictures of the basement wall framing and some more pics of the backfill and initial grading.



Our well is finished now, over budget unfortunately.



And it seems that we got a few cracks in the foundation walls during backfilling.



Finally, since it has been getting very cold and our house isn't coming any time soon, we needed to insulate the footings to make sure that the earth under them would not freeze and "heave" them. The hay was full of black mold, and now so am I. :-(



I'm glad that we finally got some snow, and I'm hoping for a lot more, even though it may hinder the house project some. Winter without snow sucks!

Busy day today...

Lots of stuff happening today! Our well is being drilled, and our excavator is backfilling around the foundation.



Oh, and here is a picture of the "draintile" installed via much effort and mentioned in a previous post.

Catchup News

On Friday Emily and I worked to dig a trench for the drain tile inside the basement. The gravel had frozen and become like concrete, three to four inches thick. I swung the pick repeatedly while Emily scooped out the gravel that I broke loose. After we got about half done, we called it a day. On Saturday, Fred came out and swung the pick while I scooped (a much better arrangement) and Anna supervised. Nathan and Andrew moved the big chunks of frozen gravel and then ran around the construction site shooting imaginary combatants. :-) Finally the trench was done and we were able to lay the drain tile in the trench and be done.

We're still waiting on the in-basement plumbing to happen, probably early this week, and the excavator is likely to be backfilling this week also. We hope to get the basement slab poured before it gets too cold.

We visited our new house today!

Today we drove out to the Design Homes factory in Prairie du Chien to see how things were coming with the work there. We were able to actually walk through the rooms. Everything was looking great!

Picture Catch-up!

Here are some pics of the well guys trenching the water line and wires into the basement.



And here are some pics of the work we did yesterday brushing tar on to the foundation to seal it! You can also see the garage foundation that was added earlier in the week.