It's Almost Recognizable as a Home

HI!

An update as we move through the foundation stage of building. The previous post showed the forms and the pouring of the walls on Monday of this week. Pouring the walls was completed in one day, the concrete set over night and the forms were "stripped" on Tuesday. Stripping involves removing the boards and supports that were so carefully installed week before last.

Stripping off the wood forms makes a world of difference in being able to visualize the house.

Here's the most recent shot of the garage area. The concrete walls are stepped from the right to the left and around the corner to match the final countours of the lot in that are. There's no need to pour higher walls, as they will all be made of lumber (framed) and above the ground.

You can just make out that the outside of all of the poured walls looks like they have been painted a battleship gray color. That's the waterproofing for the walls that will be in contact with the backfill (dirt).

Today, subs are installing the foundation drains. All around the outside, at the base of the foundation, they dig a trench and lay an 8" flexible hose in it. The hose has holes in it, and any water that percolates down along the foundation will be collected in these pipes and moved to the front of the yard to be dumped into a drainage ditch.

In the next week or so, we can expect to have the foundation drains completed, the frost wall insulation installed and inspected, and the backfill completed.

The excavators will be back in after that to start on connection of the water and sewer laterals (from the mains in the street to the home) and the in-ground plumbing that will wind up under the slabs of the entry level floors.

Here are other pictures of the main entry level rooms:

To the left of the two blocks in the center of the room (piers for the spiral stairway) lies the mechanical room. It's behind and under the stairway, and plays the important roles of being the kitties' living space and backlighting the glass bottle wall!

To the right of the mechanical room and the stairway there's two bedrooms and a bath. The bedroom in front, with a view out of the front of the house, is the exercise room - Deb's Pilates machine, elliptical trainer, weights, etc.

Outside of the East wall (the bedrooms are along the East wall) is the foundation for a retaining wall. The distance between our house and the property line is 10 feet, so there's not much room for forming a drainage ditch, so we had to create a way for the water to move to the ditch in front of the yard. The water will cascade over the wall should there be enough flow.

The foundation for the North wall of the Great Room juts out. The top of the wall is "Level 100.00" - the level of the Main Floor and the North Courtyard.

It's really hard to get a line of sight, but it looks like the view down the valley to Chatfield Lake and to Denver beyond will be great from the courtyard. Yeah!

Maybe you caught the fact that the outside corners of the home are "rounded." Traditional adobe construction ends up having rounded outside corners on their homes. Deb asked the architects to figure out how to make ours look like the original, and they came up with making the foundation corners 45 degree angles and filling out the angle with wood framing in a semi-circle with stucco over them. Thanks Deb!!

Cheers!!