Foundation of skyscraper complete

Yesterday the foundation was poured --- 24 concrete trucks lined up! It looks super tall right now as the entire front side is excavated and you can just see a giant foundation wall. A neighbor stopped by and told us the word in the 'hood is that we are building a skyscraper. A little bit unsettling. Now we have major incentive to make it look awesome! Nick and I did some research on grading and discovered that a maximum slope of 10 degrees should be used. Minimum of about 1 degree. We will fall somewhere in the middle, so it should be OK. The question we are trying to figure out now is if it is better to be a gradual slope all the way up, or if it would be better to have a steep rise of 2 - 3 feet and then an even more gradual slope the rest of the way? Any opinions out there? The house will sit back 110' from the road, and the foundation wall is about 10'. We want to have a maximum of 7 steps up to the porch, 6 would be better. If each step is 7" tall, 6-7 steps takes off 42-49" --- meaning we need to get dirt up about 6 - 7 feet in the remaining 100'. That is 1200" length to make up a height of 72-84" --- looked at in another way, every foot needs to rise about 1.25 inches, not a very steep slope at all...But, if we put a small wall like Mom has in Indiana in front, we could take 24 inches off right off the bat and then we'd have an even smaller grade.

Anybody have any opinions or ideas?

Tomorrow is the first day of school for the boys.....

Why is this just in time?

Today I took them to a lighting store and told them they could choose the lights for their bathrooms. I figured this was a pretty low risk operation.....

All 3 entered the store and made a beeline for this one. Need I say more?

Concrete Forms....

Sunday morning.... most of the concrete forms are up. We are wondering just how many concrete trucks it will take to fill the forms? The front porch wall looks really tall, so we are analyzing the number of steps and the type of landscaping we'll need to minimize the height of the wall.

concrete

Post by Alex
Today is Thursday and it is pouring outside so we don't know whether or not the guys are going to do work. Here is what has happened this week: The concrete trucks came to pour the footers. We had an inspection too. Above are some pictures:

Week 1....

Here is a sample board of our materials:

We started digging on Monday, and here we are, Saturday morning...week 1.

The hole is looking much more defined, there is some grading, and we have had to change the retaining wall plan a bit, but I think it will look great. Today the guys are out putting in the metal rods to prepare for the foundation --- the circular part of the foundation required significant manual digging in the 100 degree heat. We went to check progress at 7 in the morning, they were there working and then at 7:30 pm we thought we could walk around privately, but they were still there working! I expected them to perhaps take a break on the weekend, but they are there working. At least it is a bit cooler today, but now it looks like rain. There are giant mountains of dirt, but they'll all be used to backfill in the front of the house. The higher the better because we don't want the house to be super high out of the ground.

In other progress, Lloyd got the gas company to come out and they were able to level out the back part of our lot significantly. It looks great and will make that rear portion of the yard much more usable.

The kids are very excited to watch the progress daily. I am glad school is starting soon because otherwise it will seem like an extremely long process to them -- a bit like, "are we there yet" in the car. Already they were asking me if they'd be able to ride their scooters on the concrete in the "basement" next week. Yikes! They've also made friends with the horses at the Equestrian center and want to stop and pet them daily. They've named them, Snowflake, Tommy and Jerry --- with a renaming occurring daily --- Snowflake is now Horace, Jerry is now Dusty.... much more "boyish" names now that they've realized the horses are boys!

We have a hole!

We are very very excited --- we went out to the property today and there is a big hole in the ground. Not much to see, but at least something is HAPPENING! It is going to be hard to not check it out every 5 seconds, but I'm going to try.

Alex has decided to help me with this progress blog, that will be fun. He'll learn a little about how to use the camera, the computer and hopefully a little bit about the building process. He is so great at drawing houses and studying and creating shapes like M.C. Escher (pronounced McEscher, like McDonalds according to our kids). I wonder if maybe we have a future architect in our house? After this entry, we'll see about having Alex do some postings himself....

Here is a picture of the hole.... whooo hoooo!