Flat and Level

We've been up working on the land for several weekends now, and, I have to admit, the progress doesn't look impressive. Marie's parents offered to come up and help us this weekend. Once Jim showed up, the structure seemed to fly up!

At first Jim and I worked on the floor girders. They went in fine except for one pier that was about a half inch too high. I had designed the pier-to-beam joint system to be adjustable with diffent shim thicknesses, so that wasn't too awfully hard to take care of. The other 11 piers were fine. Since 11/12 is more than 90%, I'm still claiming that we get an A for the pier heights.

While we were doing the girders, Marie and Julie worked on the patio. It was a lot of weight for them, but they did it really well and had all the pavers laid before we had the girders finished. That's over 90 pavers - nearly two tons! The pavers fit in perfectly between the footing pads we had done last week, and that was reassuring.

For the subfloor, Jim and I got the sheets in place while Marie and Julie drove nearly all the nails. The subfloor makes a nice shady place that Luke discovered almost immediately. We were done by about noon on Sunday! It's hard to believe that walls will be going up next week.

Dirt and Concrete

This was the weekend that we planned to put in our foundation. For several reasons, we decided to use a pier foundation, but it really boils down to the fact that it's the only option I could find that gets us below the frost line (60 inches!) while still being inexpensive and something we could do ourselves. We have to distribute the load over more soil area than the tubes alone provide, so we're using the 24" diameter tube bases that you can see in the picture.

We wanted to do it ourselves, but the thought of digging 16 holes that are five feet deep was more than we wanted to tackle. That's why we contracted Larry to help us out with his 30" auger. Even so, dealing with one unfortunate big rock and all the dirt that came out of the holes made the job a little tricky. And of course, after Larry left, Marie and I were left to place the forms and backfill the pits on our own. Marie developed a very effective bulldozer technique that you'll have to ask her about sometime.

We discovered that our land has lots of wild rasberries, and having fresh berries for breakfast was an outstanding surprise.

On Sunday, we cut all the tubes so the tops are level. We also put together a series of square forms on top of tubes that are below grade. These are going to be footing pads for posts that hold a roof over our patio. I've planned it so that the square pads will fit in with the paver bricks - essentially taking the place of a brick in the pattern. We'll see how that works out . . .

On Monday the concrete truck was scheduled to arrive at 10:00. This was a tense moment because Larry has had some trouble getting his equipment up our driveway. I've done a little work on it to make it more accessible, so all I could do was hope the truck didn't get stuck. Boy, was it a relief when the truck made it up the driveway with no problems other than a pine bough that went into the driver's open window.

An hour later, the concrete was poured, and the truck was gone. Marie did a great job as a concrete finisher. After the work was done we had a little fun and put our name, the year, and Luke's paw print in one of the little footing pads. Here's Luke looking proud next to his autograph.

So now, the piers are in place. We're ready put on the floor beams and lay down the paver patio. Hopefully, that will happen next week, and it will finally start looking like something!