Today they did things that need to be done, but aren't as impressive as a new wall. They worked on some of the headers over doors and windows. This is the header over the front door. The gap over the header shows how much we are going to be lowered.
They also put boards on the house to match the walls.
They finished putting up the exterior and interior walls of the house today The front wall has a lot of gaps because of the two garage doors. They couldn't put the headers in because of the beams holding up the house are in the way.
This is the last interior wall. This is the one they started yesterday. We still have water under the house.
They need to put in posts to help hold up our floor. These are three of them. There are others in other parts of the house.
They also need to put in concrete blocks under our fireplace. This pad with rebar poking up is where they go.
They built this interior wall today. This wall has the door that separates the garage area from the rest of the walk space.
They are also building another interior wall. This one will be the side to one of our garages.
They either built three small walls or one wall that has three parts today. This wall (these walls) form one side of one of our new garages.
The drain pipe from the kitchen (the black pipe), the hot water pipe (the red pipe), and the cold water pipe (the blue pipe -- I like color coded water pipes) are over the new wall. The hot and cold water pipes are flexible and may be able to be moved out of the way, but the drain pipe will need to be disconnected to lower the house onto the walls.
Wednesday they put up three more walls. This is the wall they started Tuesday. I notice our new neighbor has a boat.
These are the two walls they skipped on Tuesday. One of the walls has a couple of windows in it. We put windows in our walk space so we wouldn't need to use artificial light all the time.
They added a lot of bracing to the walls they skipped Tuesday. They couldn't build the walls as solidly as they wanted with the beams in the way.
They added the the wall under the east side of the dining area Tuesday. This wall also has a window.
They skipped the next two walls. The one under the north side of the dining area and the one under a bathroom and guest bedroom. I don't know if it is because the plumbing goes through those walls or because there isn't much room to lay the wall out on the ground.
They have the wall that goes under the guest bedroom and master bedroom almost complete.
We are still using space heaters and the oven to heat our house. You can see why we can't use our forced air natural gas furnace. There are two beams under where the duct work would start under our furnace.
We added two more walls today. They are also doing work under the house before they build the walls. This wall is under the back of our family room. It has a window so we can get some natural light in our walk space.
The other wall they built was on the north side of the family room. It has a window and a door. You can also see our back door which we are not currently using.
They added more to the wall on Friday. We have a wall (or at least the skeleton of a wall) along the entire south side of the house (our house faces west but not due west). I like to walk through our walk space, following where the doors and walk ways will be, imagining what it will be like when it is finished.
I don't know what changed but it now looks like they won't need to get the house movers to raise our house more. I guess we are up enough.
Monday we found out the duct work needs to be three feet above the hundred year flood level (also called the Baseline Flood Elevation or BFE). We are going to need to get the house movers to raise our house another two feet.
They also are marking the location of the studs. Most of the walls will be two by six. Some of the walls will be two by eight because of the way the our floor is constructed.
We also discovered that the surveyor put some elevation marks on the telephone poles across the street.
Thursday the bolts that allow the wall to be attached to the foundation had the concrete cleaned off them. You can see the bolts are shiny now.
One of our neighbors has joined us on Jenga stacks. This is a view of that house from our kitchen window. When I look out I feel like I am living in a tree house.
We had someone smoothing out the concrete so they can put a wall on it. The right side is a smoothed concrete where they will put a wall. The left side is a doorway that hasn't been smoothed so you can see the difference. The tool he was using tripped a circuit breaker. He had to get a latter to get to the circuit breaker box.
They have been finishing removing the forms and filling in dirt around the new foundation for the past couple of days. The dirt piles in our yard are disappearing.
Friday they started removing the forms. They removed almost all the forms on the stem walls.
We have the remains of them washing out the concrete trucks and the boom pipes in our front yard. In the cold weather it looks like ice.
Today they poured the concrete for our foundation. The inspector came just before the concrete. Our contractor likes to pass inspections the first time so everything was done right and acceptable to the inspector. The concrete trucks poured the concrete onto another truck that pumped the concrete through a hose way up into the air. You can see the boom with the concrete hose going up to the tops of the trees.
This is the boom truck and concrete truck in front of our house. The braces for the boom truck blocked most of our road.
This is the workers pouring the concrete. The one standing next Jenga stack in the blue shirt has the remote control for the boom. The one in the red shirt is controlling the end of the hose to pour the concrete.
This is the form filled with concrete. I was told we are using a six-bag mix of concrete.
They hauled a lot of dirt out of our front yard today. We still have a lot of dirt in our back yard.
