Things have been quiet a couple of days. Four of the five piers are in, but the fifth (against the house, where they are cutting the existing foundation for the door) will have to wait for the framing and backfill of the foundation to provide space for the Bobcat to maneuver.
Looking forward to the backfill, because the large pile of dirt on the driveway is getting a bit bothersome.
Meanwhile, here are some miscellaneous pix to keep your fierce interest in this fascinating project at bay.
The weather cleared and armed enough to get the helical piers started for the additional spaces. These are steel rods, square (1.5" to the side), which are bored into the ground down to the bedrock, a helical disk on the very end. When the torque of drilling down with them hits the required resistance, you've hit hard enough rock to support the building.
The estimate from the engineer, etc., was that the piers should go down about 15-20 feet, with a base quote for 25 feet on the estimate. In reality, these are ending up going down 35-45 feet before they hit something that produces enough torque to indicate a solid groundwork.
The extension of the house will rest on five of these piers.
It was slow enough going today that they'll need to come back tomorrow to finish the last two. After that, the crew can start building the forms for the foundation.
The longer piers mean additional cost to the project, but it's not exactly something you can say, "Aw, let's skip it." Them's the preventing-the-breaks.
Not much activity this week, since it's been so bitterly cold. Today the GC and Assistant came out to prep the excavation for helical piers to be sunk on Monday. These piers, down to the bedrock, will anchor the house addition and keep it from crashing down into the neighbor's yard, so it's a Good Thing.
The other activity was to extend out the slope down into the pit so that the pier excavator can get back out again after it does its work.
After that, then we start seeing forms built for the new foundation and slab and all that jazz. Then (once weather permits) concrete gets poured. Much concrete.
We reviewed another draft of the schedule, and things will start moving pretty quickly Real Soon Now.
( #WAWGANK is our new catch phrase around the household. "When Are We Getting A New Kitchen?")
"There's a hole in the yard like a great brown pit …"
So here we are, with the primary excavation finished. Not much progress Monday, as digging up finished on Sunday, and now we're waiting on the guys to install the helical piers which will hold up the new piece of house, which is a Good Thing.
The schedule for that is "this week," more detail TBD, none of which is aided (though really only inconvenienced) by dropping down to sub-freezing for the rest of the week.
It's still hard to visualize how this will all look in the end.
Needs more backhoe!
More progress in getting more dirt dug up. By the end of the day, the area for the extension of the new foundation was pretty well cleared out. Next up, as I understand it, will be getting the guys out to put in the helical piers that will keep the whole thing in place.
This week will be challenging for the project, as tomorrow we get some snow and rain in the afternoon, and temps dropping below freezing with sundown. and stays below freezing until, oh, Friday or so (with some more snow in the meantime). That won't necessarily prevent the piers being put in, or the forms being put together for the extended foundation, etc., but it will keep them from doing any concrete pouring until temps climb back up a bit — and temps don't look to be going up above 40 as far as the ten-day forecast can be counted on.
Both ends of the backhoe are getting a workout — the scoop to digg for the additional foundation, and the blade to carry the dirt around to the driveway. The space is so constrained in the side yard, though, that to turn around requires going back out onto the street.
The little excavator proving too small for the task, we got in a backhoe. Except that it was too heavy to go up the front lawn at the angle it needed to, not at all helped by the rain the previous evening (sigh).
So instead, they took it up through the front flower bed (after removing some roses and salvaging the bricks lining the edge of the grass). Problem "solved," though my front lawn is looking more and more like No Man's Land.
That does raise some interesting possibilities regarding what both the front and side yards should look like when all is said and done. Do we really want to replant grass? Alternately, if we don't, what does that mean for future projects that may involve moving heavy machinery around the house?
(Reminds self to contact lawn people to tell them we don't need them to come out any more this year.)
This was Saturday — they're going to also be working Sunday, as the weather is about to take a sudden and unfortunate turn for the worse.
Apparently slopes + overnight rain <> fun times with backhoe #KitchenProject .
Today was mostly a follow-up to the previous day, only in this case with an excavator to tackle some additional space and to finish getting the hole down to the point where the additional foundation can be added.
Between the hole and the space in front of it (for patio from the walk-out), and the huge mound of dirt resulting — there's not a lot of room. The team will be back onsite tomorrow, with a proper back-hoe to be able to both dig and carry dirt away.
And breaking ground it is, with a Bobcat (well, a John Deere something-or-another, but I'll call it a Bobcat as a class) moving in to remove some fence posts, smooth out some of the ground, and take out the lilac that lived right where the expansion will be.
I have to give myself a small pat on the back, as the two fence posts they had to take out to open up enough room to get the Bobcat back there were well-enough planted that they needed the tractor to help remove them. Since I'm the one that built the fence, that's kind of a nice complement.
More pictures (fair warning to all) to come.
But this is the baseline picture that was missing from the album yesterday, actually showing what's being expanded in the exterior. See that big, flat wall (with the little white stove vent)? It's going to be pulled out as far as the living room (on the left) into the side yard, and the basement below it as well, dug out another three feet down to make it a walk-out. Woot!
The first part of the project — through the end of the year — is external. In extending out the basement, we also want to make it a walk-out, for convenience and for house value. The basement is currently about 3 feet below grade, and even though the property slopes downward that means a fair amount of excavation and shaping of the side yard.
After that, then the basement and kitchen extension above it need foundation, framing, etc. The idea is to have that pretty much all dried in before we break the walls into the existing house. That provides both security and weather protection.
So that's the first thing going on, and in prep for that we spent some hours in the back yard getting things ready:
– Picking up miscellaneous things from the ground that oughtn't be there anyway, as well as the various green men on the fences.
– Chopping back the climbing roses from the sections of fence that will need to be removed to get equipment into the back yard.
– Picking up the brick edging we had around the grass in the back yard, where it would be in the way of construction or in areas being excavated.
– Removing the memorial stones we have for cats passed on from an area that will be impacted by the construction.
– Digging up some roses and some irises that might be munched by the process.
So, some good exercise, and a bit more "Oh my God, this is actually, finally happening" reality checking.
So the first stuff with the kitchen project kicks off next week. These are some reference exterior photos of the house. The kitchen is in the back portion of the (eastern) side of the house shown (the stove vent is the white-painted bit on the wall there). That section is going to be extended out about eight feet, as far out as the living room in the front of the house extends. The basement is being similarly extended, and will be dug out so that it's a walk-out on that side. The kitchen will have a partially vaulted roof, which will pitch up opposite the living room roof. There will be about a ten foot gap between those two extending wings.
(I realize there's one more angle I need to take a picture from tomorrow.)
Anyway, that's how it looks now … I'll be adding pictures to the album as we get towards then. (I'll also start up a new album when we start doing things inside).
So actually some exciting news on the Kitchen Expansion / Remodel: things may actually be about to happen.
We've been finalizing the scope of work and contract for weeks now, but that finally seems ready and the plan is to sign on the dotted line on Thursday (eep!). That same day, the Contractor will be scoping out the first thing that needs to be done — properly capping off the sprinkler system in the area to be excavated (since it's going to go right through all the feed lines to the side and front of the house).
Good thing we had the sprinklers blown out yesterday.
Actually beginning that, and other excavation work … starts Monday.
Woot! Also, again, eep!
We're about to drop a substantial sum of money to redo and expand the kitchen (and the basement beneath), but when all is said and done, it will be a very, very cool thing. The project is currently scheduled to go out into February. We'll see how that looks when we get there …
Apparently, with the introduction of more and more high-efficiency washers, detergent manufacturers are seeing their business drop — as people start paying attention to how much detergent they pour in, and thus need to buy less detergent.
Efficient, indeed.
Originally shared by +Les Jenkins:
Detergent Companies Are Unhappy With Our Efficient Washing Machines
High-efficiency washing machines, which use less water to clean your clothes, are an advance that most customers seem to like. Do you know who doesn’t like them, though? Detergent manufacturers. Wi…
To once more cut a rakish figure around my house.
(h/t +Marty Shaw)
Originally shared by +BobbieZen:
Happy Fall Y'all
On a regular basis, the happy-peppy folk from Comcast contact us to say, "Hey, you use our Cable TV and Internet Broadband services — why not go for a triple-play and use our VOIP phone services, too?"
And my answer has always been, "Hey, our cable and/or internet have intermittent problems, but our US West Qwest CenturyLink POTS phone service is always there, solid and stable."
(And, yes, we want a land line. We live in a mobile phone pit — indeed, we got a Verizon femtocell to books mobile connections, which connected to the outer world, ironically, through our broadband. And I like having a phone connection that's not power-dependent.)
So for the past few months we've been having occasional phone problems — partial rings, rings that don't connect when we pick up, etc. I had thought that it was a problem with our cordless phone system. Margie thought it might be a phone line problem, maybe associated with rain storms.
And then, Thursday, we had a major, major rainstorm, and I got home from my business trip (delayed an hour by DIA being closed), and found Margie on her mobile with CenturyLink, because our phone service went completely out, though apparently the line was showing as busy. (Thus also confirming that her diagnosis of the problem was better than mine.)
The CenturyLink folk, in turn, informed us that it would be a week before we could get someone out to even look at the problem. A week without landline service. Which is what we bother dealing with CenturyLink for.
So one of their techs will be out on Thursday. And I strongly suspect it will take a subsequent trip to resolve the problem, at least. All of which, to be perfectly honest, makes me think that Comcast's VOIP service will be getting a much harder look next time they contact us with a possible deal.
On the bright side, not having a land line is cutting down on a lot of extraneous phone calls for political polls or touting one candidate or another, or for hail damage inspections / repairs. So maybe CenturyLink has done us a service …
After a long afternoon of peeling, we ended up with about 16 cups of apple from last weekend’s harvest. Apple crisp, here we come!
