We woke up early today and headed out to move some sand in our storm/root cellar before rock goes into open areas in the floor this week.

We designed this space for shelter from storms, but also to keep garden food fresh all winter and to hold a 1000 gallon rain water collection tank. Water […]

Randy Koball and crew arrived on site today to finish filling, tamping and laying rebar for the garage slab. In the cellar, under the south end of the garage, they built framing for the floor, about half of which will be poured; the remaining floor will be filled with gravel to allow a more natural […]

Today it was about as humid as it can be without rain—and hot. About 8 p.m. I went to measure the amount of sand inside our garage foundation and the distance of the radon pipe conduit from the north cellar wall. Hmmm…How much more sand is needed to support the garage floor? Will the cellar […]

Viking Electric returned today to finish the work they’d begun yesterday on burying conduit from where the main electrical service panel will be located in the garage, under the breezeway, and into the house. Scott and his crew also finished installing temporary power next to the garage to support contractors’ work in the weeks ahead. […]

STS Plumbing is back on site today to set and bury the rest of the plumbing lines needed under the house. Unlike houses built with a basement where you can conceivably access mechanical runs to the first floor, our house is being built on-grade (no basement or crawlspace), so there’s no ‘second chance’ for certain […]

Site work is scheduled to resume later in the week when plumbers and electricians return to bury more pipe and conduit just ahead of the final concrete work and gravel back-filling within the house foundation.

In the meantime, Nancy (especially) and I have been working to get ahead on other details, this past weekend focusing […]

A busy day today as our excavator, Stan, and crew returned to begin back-filling around the foundation. We’re lucky to have a ready supply of sand from a corner of our property that leads into an old sand/gravel pit—an area we’re ‘reclaiming’ into something that will more closely resemble its natural surroundings. Digging, hauling and […]

The June monsoons appear to be over and work resumed today—a week later than we’d hoped. Vilen Construction is back on site to waterproof the foundation walls around the cellar. We’re using a material not routinely used to waterproof residential foundations in this area; Volclay panels are a “biodegradable kraft board filled with […]

Water is top-of-mind this week. Today’s site visit reveals that work is underway on the community well that will eventually serve us and our future neighbors. It’ll be several weeks before connections will be made to the house, but it’s good to see drilling is scheduled to commence this week. In the distance, our building […]

As it turns out, the foundation forms were set and filled just in time; storms again arrived overnight Thursday into Friday morning, dumping slightly more than another inch of rain on the area. Jesse called from Koball’s to confirm the crew was able to get back to the site just fine and were in the […]