Pictures of the house I'm
building - late July, the basement.
July 31st: Partial back fill and basement floor. A long hot
day of moving dirt and rock, lots of shoveling rock to put it where
the backhoe can't reach and then even it all out using the laser
level. I put the chair (hiding to the right in the basement shade)
down as a joke; one of the two excavator guys said that if I was
going to help, then he could take it easy and I should bring him
a lawn chair. During the eight-hour day in the hot windless sun,
they never sat down except in the seat of a backhoe or bobcat.
They didn't even bother with lunch. I sat down from time to time. I
stopped for lunch. I'm writing this two days later and I'm
still not recovered.
But hard work gets stuff done. The basement floor is covered with
gravel, ready for plumbing to go in. The boards near the
stove pier are for a footing I'll need for an interior load-bearing
wall, just enough to support the long floor trusses that reach
all the way from the bump-out (right) to the north wall (left).
And the eight-foot moat is gone. We won't need any giants to put the
floor trusses on, the ground around the basement walls
is now only a few feet below the tops of the walls.
July 26th: The foundation drainage is 'finished' as far as it
can be until
a trench for the exit to day light is dug. The green pipe is coming
from
the basement stair drain, sneaking under the exterior drain pipe.
The
mostly buried pipe (farthest right) is the interior drainage, lowest
of
the three because it goes under the footings. All three will be
heading
off to the south west (bottom right in picture) where they will pop
out
of the sloping ground about 40 feet away.
July 25th: The north side of the basement. The black strip at the
bottom
is the bottom 8" of the drainage mat, bent over on top of the
footings and
held in place with rock. The five horizontal boards hold the foam
insulation
and the drainage mat in place, one Tapcon (concrete screw) in each.
In
two places the Tapcons wouldn't hold even after three attempts, and
we just
braced the board in place with another board. We're ready for more
drainage
stone, then landscape fabric, and then back fill.
The interior drainage was easier (no mud) but we took the time to
dig out and control the slope to drain everything to the
south west near the stairs. For the exterior drain, the excavator
had already done that. The block pier in the middle of the
house will support the masonry stove that goes upstairs. The stove
is heavy enough to need it's own foundation.