Well, it has begun!  I will finally be telling my friends about this site so they can follow along.  I also created a parallel Facebook page for those friends and family who always stay in Facebook.  It also lets me have this cool “like” button on the right hand side of the screen.   Since I plan to record and upload videos, I also started a channel for “Simon@HomeInTheEarth.com” on Youtube.  I uploaded my first video here…

Excavation, day 1

Excavation, day 1

We still have not closed on our loan, we don’t even have a closing date (we have had 3, but currently don’t have any).   On the other hand, construction season is passing us by,  so we decided to go ahead with the excavation.

We ended up going with Roe Brothers Excavation.  I liked them personally, I liked that they met with me when they said they would and they got me a quote like they said they would.  I also really liked the quote.  I liked it so much, I was a bit concerned about what I would discover from the references. I was quite relieved when all the references came back very positive.  I asked each reference when Roe Brothers had worked for them and they all said, “just a few weeks ago…”  It actually took me a week to getting around to calling them, so that is a really good sign that they weren’t cherry picking their references.

Roe Brothers showed up right on time, actually, I got Marty, not sure if he is a brother or a nephew. I’ll ask him next time I get a chance.  First, Sherri took care of the initial paperwork and payment. Then we reviewed the bulldozer plan, we discussed which area to level, how deep, and where to push the soil and dirt.  They only had a bulldozer on site and said they wouldn’t actually be getting the excavator in that day.  It was busy on another job, presumably with another brother?  Most of the home is slab on grade, so we still needed to level the site today.   But we would need to wait to excavate the basement portion until next Thursday.  However, this backed up my schedule because the footings guy was scheduled for next Thursday…  I called and canceled the footings, but then at the end of the day, we found out that the excavator will be available by noon tomorrow, so maybe we are back on track?  I won’t call the footings contractor back until I know for sure.

On the one hand, my lot is sandy, so it was pretty easy to work with…  On the other hand, there was a lot of sand to work with.  There was a dip in the middle of the site.  We need to go down to undisturbed earth for the footings, so we couldn’t just fill in the dip.  Instead, the bulldozer had to get everything down to that lowest level.  They setup a laser level at a certain height and then a device in the dozer would tell Marty if he was too high, too low, or just right.  I think it took longer (and more work) than Marty was expecting, so it is a good thing that I was on a fixed bid.  But Marty was good about it and went out of his way to do a great job.  He even cleaned up the driveway slope at the end of the day.

While the bulldozer was busy doing his work, I was busy putting in a couple hundred feet of silt fence. I don’t expect any erosion, but it is a requirement of my “soil erosion permit” and the 60$ worth of silt fence and a few hours of manual labor are better than the $2500 fine for not putting it up.  The boys helped a bit.  They spent most of their lives hearing that this house was coming, so we took them out of school for the day so they could see the ground breaking.  I got some pics of them helping with the silt fence, but it is on Sherri’s camera and I am too tired to upload them now. Instead, here are some fun ones I snagged with my cell phone.

My younger boy is a bit of a Ham.

They really enjoyed playing in the dirt pile during a break.