Finishing the Backfilling, Starting the Plumbing

HI!

Since last we connected, the walls have solidified, the freeze-protecting insulation has been installed and some of the final grading is complete.

And ..... happily, Deb has returned from her adventure on the West coast. She's back at it, busily helping Steve the Builder and, today, the Plumber. Thanks Deb and welcome back!

They are talking about the next few weeks ..... when the Radon gas removal system is in, the under slab plumbing is installed, and the floor slabs are all poured and cured.

There's a lot of the major plumbing installed under the floor slab of the main floor. Here, the ditches are being dug ...... oooops! caught the workers leaning on instead of using their shovels.

We made our first in-construction change today. If you see in back of the young man with the blue ball cap, there's a sort of shelf in the wall behind him. It's there in order to support the Great Room above, but it's being treated by the architectural firm as a crawl space. According to the architectural firm, it'll have a heavy plastic barrier laid on the ground and that "window" area would be framed in and covered over with wall board. We suggested that a slab could be poured instead of putting in plastic, and we could use the area as a storage ..... we'd put nice matching doors on the space so we could close it off. Nice, cheap addition to the storage areas of the house!

There's actually another "crawl space" in the workroom. It's a little smaller, but between the two crawl spaces, we've added about 200 square feet of storage area.

The work of backfilling is in its last days. The excavator is taking the dirt from the piles around the yard and bucket-by-bucket filling in the volume between the outside of the wall and the inside of the original excavation - about 3 feet. The smaller machine in the foreground has a "sheep's foot" on the end of the boom. The sheep's foot is placed on the loose dirt and hydraulically vibrated under the full weight of the machine. That compacts the soil layer by layer until the dirt is compacted level with the top of the forms. Hopefully, the stockpiled dirt around the yard is gone and the compacted soil is level with the top of the forms at the same time so that no more dirt has to be trucked off site (very expensive!).

Cheers!!