SUMMARY: 

• Monday – Bracing Removal and Void Patching
• Tuesday – Thursday
  • The french drain showdown
    • One more epic fail 😦
    • Final fix – fingers crossed
  • Flooring wood package arrives! 
• Friday-Saturday – Never ending backfill

Hey all!
I can’t believe another week has come and gone. And it’s not February anymore! Time is flying! But we have made a lot of progress. It is so exciting that we have such a good jump start on our project.

There was a good amount of demanding physical labor this week. It all started Monday when John “the ICF guy” came with another guy and removed all the bracing. Later that day I helped with filling the voids in the ICFs. Pumping the grout into the wall It was a pain! I believe we went through forty, 50 pound bags of grout cement. Overall though it was a success and I am feeling lots better about the structural integrity of the walls :).  The only bad news was that we missed two smaller voids. We will do the other two small ones when we pour the second story walls.

Throughout the middle of the week I declared all out war on the dumb french drain 🙂 We did end up deciding to take it all the way out to daylight. Which just happened to be another 250 feet away. For those that don’t know, that is a LONG trench and a LONG way to divert water. We did get lucky on the pipe materials though! That made me happy. I had to buy 23 sticks of 10′ green sewer pipe which is normally at least $25 a piece.  Luckily, Lowes in Twin Fails had them on clearance for $5.20!   So $600 in materials turned into $150. We drove all the way to Twin with a trailer for them and when we got there the store said they were buried in the back and that we should come back tomorrow……………..

After explaining that we’d driven over an hour with a trailer just for these they decided to dig them out for us that night.  I almost got super angry 🙂

So with pipe in hand, we dug out the remaining 250′ of trench. We set up the transit and just made sure the trench was dropping 2″ every 10′. So, I dug the trench and then put all the pipe in and tested it. Water was flowing, we were golden. Trench Dug for Drain

Sam and I installing pipe and playing in the mud

Pipe in Drain run (before I destroy with backfill)

Then I start backfilling the trench, test it again and it’s not working!!!!!!  I about lost it. I was physically and mentally exhausted. Digging that back up was the last thing I wanted to do. But, I knew right where to look. Right where the pipe crossed over the big hole, I was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten enough fill underneath it because of all the water.  So I dug right where I thought the problem was and found it pretty quick and sure enough I crushed a pipe with the backfill. Once again another epic fail 😦 

I did get in and patch it up and put a bunch of gravel under it to support it and got it working again. Of course that involved getting down in the trench and getting super muddy again. There was SO MUCH MUD. Through the whole process. That whole east pasture is a mud swamp. There are a few places that I don’t even know if you’d get out if you fell in. So much water and mud!

Finishing the drain collection point

After all that was finished, on Friday from 5p.m. to 10p.m. and Saturday from 6a.m. to 9p.m. was all day back filling. It was a ton of work! Karianne worked alongside me which was a lot of help!  She might be regretting it now but it made a huge difference. Karianne the country girl! 

Taber and Rebecca also came again and Taber was a huge help running that jumping jack. So grateful they came!  There was a lot of back and forth with the excavator carrying buckets of dirt around as well as someone getting pounded by the jumping jack. (Last night I woke up at 1:30 and it felt like my whole body was throbbing. That was a new sensation for me).

Also we had to remove an endless supply of roots! They were everywhere in our dirt and in our garage floor. We definitely had some big ole trees here before we started.  Anyhow to sum it all up we got a lot done and it was a great week. To top it all off Karianne was able to back the Yukon into the garage even! It was fun to see how it fit in the garage.

As fun as this has all been, I can’t not explain in words just how excited I am to be done with earth and dirt work!!!  I am way tired of mud and being extra dirty! It is a miracle our excavator is still working, it has done soooo much work for us on this project already. But she is old and tired and could give out any moment. It’s kind of stressful every time I drive it knowing it could give out at any minute. We just need it to last a little longer!!. Until next week!

Karianne’s Summary

Mark