WHAT’S THE LATEST?

The block walls are up and going.  It’s amazing.  Now all of the stuff is out of the middle of the basement, so now it really looks like a house.  All of the extra pieces are out, and now all I have is mud puddles again, because it rained all day today.   John was supposed to have a piece of equipment called a Taramite, which is like a mini backhoe that will fit in through the garage doors and allow him to level off the basement floor, because the concrete hasn’t been poured.  It was supposed to be poured on Friday, but with the amount of rain that we just got, I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not.   We’re going to see how the rain goes.  I’m not very happy about it right now.

They started digging the French drains around the walls - and they’re all filled up, more or less.

WHAT ARE FRENCH DRAINS?

Essentially, you dig a ditch, and then you fill it with different sizes of gravel, and then you cover it back up.   It helps to move the water away from the house in a nicer way than using open drain pipes.  So, they started digging those, and they filled up - and that was pretty much the end of the project.  I hope that it dries out and that John can get in there tomorrow with the Tarimite and get the floor taken care of, and re-dig the French drains.

We’re supposed to have stone delivered tomorrow for the basement - two kinds of stone - one, that’s a rough-cut rock, that they’ll put down before they pour the basement floor, and the other to go on the outside of the foundation wall for the French drains.   We’re having it all delivered in one shipment, rather than paying for two shipments.   By the way, there’s a new term I’ve learned - since I’ve never done any of this before - and it is “Will Call.”  And that’s how you order most of your building materials - “Will Call.”   So, we call the suppliers and tell them whether or not we want them to deliver the materials.  We’ll call at 7:00 tomorrow morning, and if it’s dry enough, then we’ll have the stone delivered.   If all that goes well, we have cement that’s on “Will Call” for Friday morning.  We’re also supposed to have the coating put on the basement walls on Friday, as long as it doesn’t rain.

SO, AFTER THE FOUNDATION IS FINISHED, WHAT’S NEXT?

Oh, we have this huge, huge center beam.  It’s an I-beam that goes in the basement and runs the whole length of the house.  That thing is amazingly huge!  This huge, big crane came to the site unload it, and I was like, “Wow, this is so cool!”  For the place where it goes, they actually cut out the block to put it in.  There will be a pole in the middle to help support it.

After that center beam is put in, they can start framing the floor - putting in the floor joists.

DO YOU HAVE ELECTRICITY ON THE SITE YET?

We found out that the gentleman who was our representative, got moved to another county - and we got lost in the paperwork.  So, we had a supervisor call us last Monday and said we are a priority on the list - and that we should see someone out to the site by Friday of this week.  They already have the markings on the road, where the power poles will go.  So all we need is for them to come out and put the poles in, so that we can have electricity.  I guess this is part of the house building experience - and I’m sure that people who do this professionally go, “Yeah, this is why we have checklists.”  (laughing)   I would suggest that to anyone else.

HOW ABOUT THE OTHER QUOTES?

The cabinets and windows are officially on order.  Those companies have deposits, so that aspect is done.  The only windows that we won’t have ahead of time are going to be the trapezoid windows in the A-frame.  They’ll measure for those windows after we frame, in case we’re a little bit off.  Those will take about fourteen business days to make.  I don’t think it will be too much of an issue.   The other windows will come first, and they should be here in about six to eight weeks - which I’m hoping is the timeframe for when we will actually start to need the windows.   I’m not quite sure, since this is our first time.   Six to eight weeks seems like forever right now.  But I’m sure it will all of a sudden be here, and I’ll be like, “Where did the time go?”

We just started looking at skylights, because we’ll have a couple of those.  I wanted to get them quoted, but I need to know what the pitch is on the roof - which I didn’t look up today.  The other option that I have - which I think is really cool, but is probably too expensive - is, windows that automatically close when it rains.   Isn’t that amazing?  I think it sounds really good, because they will be way, way up.   It just depends on how expensive they are.

SOUNDS LIKE YOU’RE ON A ROLL

Yes, as long as it stops raining long enough for us to get to the next step, we’ll be good to go.  We really thought the rain would be more in the Spring, which is why we held off from starting.   We figured that we wouldn’t have rain issues in the Summer - but I guess we should have gone the other way.  But that’s OK.  It’s a life lesson.  So, oh well, on to the next thing.