Framing starts

This was a great week - they started the framing, and we can now see actual rooms: the garage and lower bedroom as well as their views. The lake has looked beautiful all week as Seattle has enjoyed a gorgeous week of weather. Tonight when we were driving home there was a full moon over the lake that was breathtaking.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with all the family yesterday, and remembered that it was exactly a year ago that Paul came home from the hospital following his car accident. Joy!

We've been floored

This week was exciting because they laid the cement slab, and now we have the look of a real house.

John DeForest, our wonderful architect, suggested that we place an old coin in the slab for good luck, so we placed an old lucky penny right in the front of the garage. Paul's mom, Delphie, used to save the old pennies that are called "wheat pennies" - they have wheat sheafs instead of the Lincoln Memorial on the back side. We also couldn't resist putting our initials in the cement, too.

We have a garage!

Paul and I are thrilled to see the outline of our new garage; although garages were part of our lives growing up in the Midwest, we haven't had one in the thirty years we've been in Seattle!

We are also delighted to see the view from the entry -

We are having a great time watching all the stages of house-building!

Our nest is out of the ground

most of October was spent building the footings and walls for our nest

They waterproofed the walls, (the black line in the photo), brought truckloads of dirt in for the backfill, and stomped it down-

These are the forms all set up for the concrete.

So in comes the cement truck and pourer:

And they begin pouring and filling and smoothing all the cement into the forms for the footings:

Take off the forms and you've got a beautiful foundation! The footings are in place, and next will come the construction of the foundation walls.

We're nearly "out of the ground" which is a big milestone in the process.

All of the pilings have been leveled, and the forms for the concrete footings are made.


Next will come the concrete.

This was a great spectator week.

The crew from McDowell Drilling came and drilled 31 auger cast piles. Lonnie, the "pile buck" for the crew said the hardest part of the project was fitting all the machines on our little plot. There was a huge blue drilling rig with a 40 foot boom, an orange trackhoe, a big pump, and several cement trucks. It was like watching a hippo, and elephant and a gorilla all try to change their clothes in the same closet.
To make each of the auger cast piles, the guys would move the auger drill over the spot, set the "foot" and begin drilling. Each of the piles went down between 27 and 33 feet. A geotech engineer would sample the soil coming out of the ground and decide when the depth was correct. Then the drill operator would slowly begin raising the auger while the cement guy began pumping cement, or "mud", through the hollow center of the auger. As the auger came up, the cement would fill the hole, overflowing as it reached the top. Finally a long steel rod would be lowered down into the hole followed by a round steel "cage" to hold the pile and form the "cast". And then on to the next one.
It was fascinating to watch, but definitely the most dangerous worksite I've ever seen! Everything seemed to be either heavy, caustic, sharp, or swinging. If a guy wasn't holding a chainsaw or pickax, he was holding a steel pipe, cement hose, or sledgehammer!