Day two

Today they dug and poured the footers. I think I have figured out that those are the outer edges of the foundation or basement, where the exterior walls will sit. Here are some pictures:

Digging them out-you can see the little trench dug out all around the edges


Digging out where the stairs leading to the basement will be


Concrete going in (or is it cement? I'm never sure)


View from the west side. You can see the stair area in the foreground, the basement in the middle, and in the back, the crawlspace. There will only be a partial basement but still plenty big for lots of storage, the wii and kids' tv, my treadmill and maybe a pool table.If you look waaaaay in the background, you can see my turquoise blue chicken coop.


Better view of the stair area


And these last two are the ones I took after the end of the workday from the same spots as before




Tomorrow I think they are going to set the forms for the basement walls and foundation and pour them. There's a heat advisory for tomorrow so I hope the guys stay hydrated. I have the ice bucket all filled up and ready.

This is not an outhouse

I just wanted to mention, in case anyone didn't know-the little outhouse looking thing in my last post is not an outhouse! As I was looking at the pictures I realized it really did look like a port-a-potty like they use at construction sites. Nope. It's our Heatmor outdoor woodburning stove. We use it to heat our house (and it will also heat our new house) and it saves us a ton of money on our gas bill. We burn wood it in, which we get for free from my father-in-law's woods, and it heats a tank of water. The heated water goes through a pipe into our basement where it goes into a radiator-like device. Our regular furnace's fan blows over it and that forced air heats our house. It comes through the heat registers just the same as if it was heated by our regular furnace. If the wood fire ever goes out and the house gets too cold, the regular furnace will kick on. That almost never happens though. We could hook it up to heat our water heater and dryer but we haven't done that. Maybe someday. We first had it installed and starting using it in February (can't remember what year) and when we got our natural gas bill, it was less than it was the previous August. And if you've ever lived in the Midwest in February, you know that's saying a lot. It gets cold-there's a reason they say February might be the shortest month but out here, it feels like the longest.

Here is a better view of it (that is a big patch of weeds in front of it)


And I was going to put this in my last post and forgot - a picture of a very curious kitty among the dirt piles

Day One - the excavation begins

Today the excavating/cement crew came out and dug the basement. Here are some before, during and after shots. I took these from two angles, standing in the same spots each time. I'm planning to take all of my progress pictures from these two spots-whenever I remember.


The site, before any digging (ignore the grain head in the 2nd picture-Steve moved that before they got started).




during the dig




after the dig




Tomorrow they'll come out and do...something. Maybe the footers, whatever those are.