Walls done!

Standing on the lower road (Willow) looking up at the house.

Standing on the upper road (Cherry) looking down and to the right of the house. This closest corner is the bedroom that Trevor has claimed as his.

This is the giant support column for the front porch.

The garage. Obviously needs A LOT of fill!

The walls are done! Hopefully this week they will spray them with waterproofing stuff, put in the footing drains and downspouts. Then this weekend Ron will be backfilling. Then they will pour the basement floor and then hopefully they will start with the actually building.

Oh yeah, that is snow that you are seeing on the ground! Yep, snow on April 2nd, great b-day present huh?

The Fortress

I hadn't visited the lot at all this week due to Trevor being sick and then me being sick. Anyway, Ron stopped by tonight and insisted that I go out there also. So we all climbed in the truck and off we went. To say the least I was a little suprised to see all the forms up and how high they are! Granted that the foundation doesn't necessarily go to the top of the forms but it was still overwhelming. We also got a really really good shot of our view from the "main" floor. In case any of you are wondering the red thing that Trevor is pointing at is a rebar cutter / bender. I didn't know what it was and had to ask Ron. I took a bunch of pictures so I apologize in advance!

Concrete footings almost done

I dropped by the lot today expecting to see just the forms for the concrete footings done but I was pleasantly suprised! They have almost all of the footings done already. there is a small section that is not done yet, not sure why but I don't care they are farther along than I expected! YIPPEEE! At least you can get a better idea of what the house is going to be shaped like. Stay tunes for more at this rate these guys might be done with the entire foundation by the end of next week!

ground work for foundation footings done

Ron and Doug were able to get the foundation all dug out and the groond for the footings all ready to go for the foundation crew tomorrow! YEAH! We rented a compactor to make sure that our compaction tests will pass tomorrow. Yes, I ran it briefly and ron had to get a picture of me just to prove that I do actually work sometimes! HEHE!

more pictures!

Trevor got to ride with Ron in the dump truck today! Before doing this he was out raking the dirt and rock to help make it level and he wore himself out! He slept like this in the dump truck for about an hour!

Great progress!

Today Ron and Doug Ross, a friend from work made GREAT progress! The foundation is "rough cut" and tomorrow they should be able to finish by excavating out the footings. Is was soooo nice to pull up this afternoon and see the hole! When they first started digging it was questionable because when Doug tracked the excavator over to start digging the tracks were not moving but the excavator was. It was so slimy that he was sliding down the lot! Once he got the layer of slime off though we discovered that there is some good "hard pan" (bearing soil) under it, yeah! We still decided to bring in some rock to have a nice capillary break under the basement floor and also it makes it a "cleaner" site. I will try to get out there and take more pictures tomorrow!

Standing on Willow Road (lower road) looking up at lot. The photo on the left is looking across the lot to the left hand property line and the photo on the right is on the right side.

Standing on Cherry Rd (upper road) looking down and to the left side of the lot. If you look really really really hard you can see a small glimpse of Lake Stevens to the left side of the big lone tree. Trust me it is really hard to see even when you are at the lot in person. =)

Standing on Cherry Rd (upper road) looking down at the right side of the lot.

So it begins

A friend of mine told me about this site and used it to keep everyone up to speed on her house project and so I am hoping to do the same. Please feel free to post comments or e-mail me I would love to hear any feedback!

Here is a brief re-cap. Ron and I bought a building lot in Lake Stevens last May. It had a house on it that was built in the 20's and that had a fire in the 80'. Once the fire hit the house was abandoned and to say the least left a lot to be desired. So we obtained all the proper permits and tore it down.

Then we sold our house on Camano in July and have been renting a house in Marysville since.

Once the house sold we had plan drawn up by Country Roads Home Design on Camano Island. We recommend this guy so if you would like his info let me know. Once we had our plans we started talking to builders. We ended up with Klempel Construction, the owner is Bart Klempel and he is a really nice guy. He has actually been helping us through the entire process.

We finally obtained the building permit about the middle of January and we finally started working on the lot last weekend. We brought in a Cat 320 excavator to remove the brush pile that was left over from domolition and to dig the foundation.

Once the brush was removed we discovered that there is a pretty soft patch where the old house was, so we stopped working last weekend until we could figure out how we wanted to approach it. The lot actually doesn't need much of a cut because we are going to make the first level of the house level with the upper road, in hopes that it will enhance our view. The problem with this is that by not needing a cut for the house building but needing to cut the bad soil out we will have to bring in lots of fill.

Of course the weather go really nasty on us this week and we had 6" of snow fall on Wednesday and it is just finally melting off today. Ron is out there with another friend of ours deciding on how best to handle the soft spot. Hopefully they will be able to just cut the foundation today though since the foundation crew is ready to go on Monday.

I will try to post some pictures!