I can’t decide if I’m insane, ambitious or a solid combination of both 🙂 We started! I dug up the foundation hole this weekend. I had two days to do it, but I think I needed three. It was a long couple of days and my body is complaining. By the soreness and tightness my body appears to think I ran an ironman. It was just trench digging though, I’ve gotten soft behind this computer. I have to admit, all weekend, I had lots of thoughts along the lines of “what on earth are we doing?”. I guess stepping out into the unknown can be nerve wracking but I’m still excited!
On Friday, I was pretty lax and having a good time. Now that I look back, I probably should have been hustling a bit more. We had to start by taking out a flagstone patio. That was kind of a pain, but once that was out of the way it was dig time! I rented a laser level and that is the ONLY way to dig a trench for a footer. It was pretty hard for me to get the trenches close to the right level. I’m not the best operator and my bucket has huge teeth on it. Not to mention the excavator wasn’t always on level ground which makes your bucket tilt. So we had to do the final leveling with a shovel and that ate up a ton of my time.
On Saturday, I was all hustle, from sun up to beyond sun down. We just barely got all the trenches dug before the sun went down. But that last third of the trenches didn’t get leveled out. In the end I think that is ok though because that 1/3 of trench is full of groundwater making the ground all mushy. Because of that we are going to have to get a truck load of rocks and dump them in and compact them after over digging a bit. Kind of a bummer we have to do that but we do want a solid foundation! Big shout out to Karianne for standing down in the trenches all day long running the laser. Couldn’t have done it without her!
The dig was not totally without incident. Yesterday we lost a good 2 hours of time when I ripped up the waterline. I knew where the main water line from the well runs to the house. But this was an old abandoned auxiliary line they had run out to a spigot in the yard. I guess they decided to cap it off years ago. We tried to cap the line right where I discovered and broke the pipe but it still didn’t hold pressure. Which meant I also broke the pipe back along the way somewhere. Luckily I have an awesome neighbor that had the fittings I needed, and let me borrow his tiny john deere combo tractor so I could find the pipe way closer to the well. After finally finding it and capping it we were good. Which was a good thing because you can’t do life these days without running water. It would have been hard to go to church with our boys all covered in mud 🙂
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