Up, out, and back!

The house is growing all over all at once. From the front of the house, it is a bit difficult to miss the brand new third floor, where only air, and often fog, lived before. Of course, the entire third floor is not there yet, just the framing for the deck and the front windows, but it's still very exciting.

And here is what it looks like from inside the house:

OK, I admit it's not much right now, but it is still very exciting to see it start and to grow.

At the same time the vertical growth spurt was in progress, the house also grew back towards the back yard. This the framing for the new part of the house on the first floor that defines the new part of the house that will extend to the rear patio. This particular wall with form one wall of the kitchen and the back of the family room.



In the meantime, the back yard, also known as the concrete ocean, also advanced from a deep muddy pit, to a deep muddy pit with lots of rebar and wooden forms to hold concrete in place long enough to turn into two massive walls.



Believe or not, just last week, this edifice of rebar and wood forms was nothing but a hand-dug pit near the top of the hill:




With any luck, and some good weather, we will soon have the massive concrete walls holding this hill back for the next 100 years.

Even the grotto got into the action this week. A temporary wooden wall transformed it into a storage enclosure, perfect to store all the dirt being excavated off the hill and waiting for shipment to a hole in need of filling, somewhere nearby.



I am still waiting for the steel beams to show up. Without the steel, the house is like boneless chicken: a tasty treat, but structurally unsound. They are also very massive and very, very cool (the steel beams, not the boneless chickens).

All Busy on All Fronts

Stopped by on Saturday to check out the progress and it is pretty clear that the crew has not been spending a whole lot of quality time in the Port-a-Potty. A scant month and a half ago, this is what the back of the house looked like:



Here's where we are today:



And here is what has been done just in the last six days:



That would be a pretty good week's worth of building, but not for this crew. At the same time the house has been growing up and out, the crew has also been digging a deep, wide trench near the top of the hill, using nothing but picks and shovels, for the base of wall 3. Here's where the walls are supposed to go:



And here's what six days of hand digging looks like:





I think I need to start stopping by more often.

Next week: Steel, the Third floor, and even more concrete.

Framed!

The concrete work has been put on pause for a couple of weeks while the engineers figure out exactly how big to make the retaining walls, and let me tell you something: the walls are not getting smaller. I just hope that that the World Bank does not figure out where all of its dam building concrete went until after the stuff sets and they can't take it back because I am convinced we could have built a small hydroelectric project across a good-sized stream with all the concrete and steel we are using just to keep the dirt in place.

In the meantime, the medium of choice is plywood and the framing has started to go up. While I am a big fan of concrete, for pure instant gratification, nothing beats framing because it is fast and it actually makes the object of the construction look like a house. As usual, the guys lost no time framing up the front of the house and the parts of the first and second floor that actually exist.



And as always, lest the readers think that we shirk heavy work, Jenn is seen here engaged in heavy concentration, deciding where to put her desk, and



where to put the large screen TV.



As I said before, we do our share of the hard work. Next steps, one more floor up.

Wall 2 Wall II

With their usual alacrity, the team poured the base of Wall 2 on Friday. By the time we got there on Sunday, the concrete had already set. Here's what it looked like before and after (Click on the photo below to see the slide show):



I just hope those guys got out of the way in time -- looks like they did.




The last piece of the Grotto side walls were also poured along the way, completing all three sides of the Grotto.




Also, there was a big load of lumber that had been delivered to the house and was waiting around to be turned into framing.




Somewhere along the way, the old garage door rolled up to the big lumber yard in the sky. It was unceremoniously replaced by a couple of sheets of plywood.



We are not particularly sentimental here.

Wall 2 Wall

The Grotto Wall, or Wall 1 as the engineers call it, is pretty well done and is already working to hold the hill back -- but that was the easy part. The second retaining wall, Wall 2 to our engineers (who are, we hope, much more skilled in coming up with a sturdy design than a clever name) is wider, taller and just to make things interesting, built 9 feet up in the air.

Here's the side plan of the house and the retaining walls. Wall 1 is pretty big, but not much of challenge since it is build on level ground.



Since this is way too easy for this crew, they now have to build a bigger wall, halfway up a steep hill, without causing the hill or the houses on either side collapse on them. Here's what that looks like in the plans:



If you take a peek at the dimensions of Wall 2, you will find that from bottom to tip, it is 14 feet tall. The base (or footing) is 8 feet wide by 2 feet deep, and the whole thing stretches 25 feet across the entire width of the property. This is not a easy wall to build anywhere, particularly up the side of a hill.

And here's what that looks like in real life. Wall 1 is the huge structure below, and up on that ledge that was just excavated, the footing for wall 2 will be poured today.



Here's a closer look at the footing, with all the rebar in place and waiting to receive a huge load of concrete.



What's odd about all of this is that this is the same hill that has been held in place with modest concrete wall and a few bricks for the last 60 years.



Why do we need this miniature version of Hoover Dam in our backyard? Did the laws of physics change recently? Is global warming causing a parallel increase in gravity and a decrease of angles of repose world wide? Or have we just been lucky all this time and our luck was bound to run out sooner or later?

We can think about this while the crew builds Wall 3, even higher up the hill, and to really make it a challenge, without using any heavy machinery.