Saturday:
Saturday morning we met the excavator out at the lot at 7 am. He quickly started clearing the top soil from the lot. Dad and I did some measurements and placed some stakes on the perimeter so that he knew how far back to scrape. We didn't have much to do on Saturday...so we spent a couple hours out there and headed home.
I got to meet one of my neighbors on our way out though. He lives across the street, and he used to work with Dad. He warned me that I am moving into a retirement village. Looks as though most people around the area are retired. His wife came down to introduce herself on Sunday afternoon. I'm looking forward to meeting the rest of my neighbors. The people directly next to me have a couple hot air balloons. Dad watched them take off out of their back yard on Sunday evening.
Sunday:
Sunday was a bit harder work than Saturday was. The entire family headed out to the lot around noon. (Laura made it a couple hours before she felt useless and decided to RUN the 6 miles home. Crazy...I know.) Batter boards needed to be put up, they needed to be squared up, and stakes needed to be put up to show the excavator where to put my basement. This sounds much easier than it really was. Many measurements were taken from my lot lines to stake out the corners of my house. Stakes were then driven into the cement. Ok...it's not really cement, but you could have fooled me! The clay is solid at my property and it took every ounce of strength I had with a sledge hammer to pound the stakes into it. I tried to let Dad do that job...because Mom and I could really only hammer them in part way and Dad would have to finish it. By far one of the funnier moments in the day was when Dad put his foot along a stake to steady it while Mom pounded on it with a sledgehammer. After giving him a look that screamed, "Are you crazy????" she swung the hammer, missed the stake and very narrowly missed Dad's foot! She might have grazed it with the hammer, I'm not sure...I was laughing to hard to clarify the details. Once all the batter boards were up, and the strings were run across them we had to do some re-measuring. Here comes the geometry part. All 4 sides of our rectangle were the right size, but when we checked it for square we had a parallelogram. The process then goes as follows 1) Move nails and string 2) Remeasure for square 3) Repeat as necessary (also can be read as repeat 15 times). Once we were square we RE-MEASURED the side dimensions. Oops! Those were off. So we went back to square one. After many iterations everything was exactly square and the dimensions were as they should be. I guess it doesn't work well for a house to be built out of square. :)
Once this was done Mom and I bailed to go meet Grandpa and Madonna for dinner at home. Dad said he'd be another 45 minutes staking off the offsets and whatever else needed to be done for the man with a shovel/backhoe. 2 hours later Dad was still not home...and we started to worry. He's not quite the spring chicken that he was when he built his last house! So Laura, Grandpa and I jumped in the truck to go make sure all was well. He was just finishing up and packing up when we got there. There were many other brightly painted stakes in the ground and things were looking good. Grandpa gave his stamp of approval, so we helped finish packing up at sent Dad home at 8:00...a good 8 hour day of work. As for this morning I have not yet heard how difficult it was for him to roll out of bed. Below is a picture of what it looked like when Mom and I left.
We had a few visitors stop out yesterday to check out the progress. I don't think they really thought it was ever going to start and they were surprised when they saw the piles of dirt on the lot as they drove by. So they had to check for themselves to be sure it was me out there!
I'll be driving by after work today to check out the hole in the ground. I'll be sure to take more pictures and keep posting them. While they are not too exciting right now...hopefully I'll have some good stuff to show you soon!
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