Construction Day 1

This morning Colleen and I were awoken to the sound of silt fence being hammered in. Before we had even rubbed the sleep from our eyes, the earth movers were already doing their thing (i.e. moving earth). The previous blog had a couple of quick shots of what had been done by 8:30am.

They did hit some snags as the day wore on. Not long before we headed to work, we heard someone say "We've already got a problem." The power line runs into the house in a place that needed to be covered by new construction. This had already been discussed two weeks ago when we had everyone out at the house for meeting. We were a little annoyed THEN that this was a surprise to our both our architect and project manager, who have been to the house many times over the course of the process. Apparently this discovery was not taken by anyone to be an action item when there were two weeks to remedy the problem, and they were forced to get an electrician out to the house on the fly to reroute the lines in order to continue.

In the meantime, the water line running into our side of the house was found to be far closer to the surface than expected, not made of copper which would show up on a metal detector, and hiding inside a corrugated plastic drainpipe. This was of course discovered when a shovel was driven into what appeared to be an innocent drainpipe and water began pouring out of it. The water had to be shut off to the entire property until they could get the pipe capped late in the day (try as they might, they couldn't get ahold of their plumber to fix it immediately). Colleen's parents' side now has water, but the goal of the addition was to be at plus one bathroom, and for tonight we are at minus two. This is supposed to get fixed tomorrow, but we've been given no promises.

Despite the problems they managed to get a huge hole dug in the backyard and poured all the footers. Not bad for day 1.

Here you can see the rebar being laid in prep for the footers. That guy is kinda short, but the hole is still impressively deep.

If you look closely in this picture you can see that the concrete truck at the house across the street at the same time as the concrete truck in our yard. Two loads of concrete have gone in so far!

Here is the finished product for Day 1. If you look closely, you can see the rebar along the back wall where the retaining wall will go.