We came, we dug, we blew things up…
I took a brief posting hiatus as my aunt and uncle were in from California and I didn’t feel like continuously posting stuff like, “It rained today, so they didn’t work.” or “Now the hole is 8 feet deep.” So, following is a brief summary of the work completed thus far.
As you may have seen in an earlier post, demolition went seamlessly. The house came down in a matter of minutes and the following days were spent filling several roll-off containers with debris.
Once the trash was removed we commenced digging out for the foundation and the basement. During that dig we encountered a pretty decent piece of what appeared to be granite cutting a swath from the center of the basement up to the garage. Removal of that and several smaller, but still pretty large, pieces of embedded rock took about 2 1/2 days. The crew that completed that work was quick and efficient and effusive about just how beautiful the site was. Fortunately for all of us, that part of the job was neither tortuously long or expensive to remove.
Once the stone was totally crunched, the excavators completed the process of digging out the foundation. A job hampered briefly by rain, but finished within the expected time frame.
A couple of notes on the stone that was removed:
While it is a pain to find a big hunk of the stuff buried in the ground where you want your house to be, there was a significant upside: our foundation will be set on solid stone. Those of you who remember your Sunday School songs will also recall that, “the wise man built his house upon the rock.” (In my case this is a fluke, but I’ll take what I can get.) So, while this initially looked like it was going to be a huge hassle, the view from the aftermath makes it clear that what we’re getting from our pain is a rock-solid base for our house. (Pun intended.) Also, the stone that we had to break up is absolutely beautiful. It’s a speckled grey and black with veins of red and pink running through it. We’ve snagged a couple of pieces to use as decoration and my aunt and uncle had us ship a few pieces back to them, along with a couple of bricks from Beacon’s former brick works, that will be cut and placed in a walkway in front of their house.
Now we’re queued-up for concrete work. By my estimation, and current rainstorms notwithstanding, we should see footings laid-in sometime next week. So, while we have a rather un-hobbit-like hole in the ground at the moment, we’re soon to see it rise above the grade again.