2012 new construction - week one

Ground breaking

On Sunday morning, the 8th of April 2012, I got a call from our excavator, Chuck Howe.  "Would it be alright if we came over this morning and start the excavation?"

I paused for a moment, it was Easter morning, before I responded, "yea, that would be OK!"

So about 11:00 am, Chuck and his son Keith show up with a bulldozer and a backhoe and start digging out the foundation of the main part of the new house - great room, tower, and guest bedroom suite.  While Keith is moving some HUGE rocks from the tower area, Chuck is moving soil with the dozer.  It doesn't take them long before they have removed the soil and loose rock to expose the solid rock underneath and they are gone by 3:30 pm.

There were some surprises... the rock under the great room is not a floater... they couldn't move it with the dozer and backhoe combined, so that rock will be incorporated into the crawl space floor.  We are also going to have more headroom along the north wall, we had thought there was about 2 feet of soil above the rock but they were able to dig down about 6 feet so instead of 3 feet of headroom we will now have about 5 feet.

Monday morning I called the lumber yard and got a load of lumber delivered early in the afternoon for the footing forms.  I had the driver dump the lumber right into the pit.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday laying out where the footings were going to go.  Because of the sloping site and the underlying rock the footings will have to be built in steps.

Tuesday afternoon we started to construct the south wall footing. Wednesday the construction continued on the west and north wall footing.

The mornings have been chilly, so we have been enjoying our coffee and doing our paperwork in the mornings and getting outside about 11:00 am, after the day has warmed up a bit.

Friday, we took a trip to Spearfish to pick up a box of DexPan, a non-explosive demolition product, a hydraulic clay.  You drill a hole, mix up the DexPan with water and pour it in... hours later the rock is broken up.  I need this to create some steps in some steep rock so the concrete in the footings has a horizontal bearing surface, rather than a diagonal surface.

On the way home we drove through Rapid City and I ordered a new table saw, a SawStop.  I had two table saw accidents last summer and wanted to get the safety added features of the SawStop as a replacement to my old and well used Craftsman table saw.

Saturday and Sunday it rained and snowed and the wind blew and it was not a great day for being outdoors, so I lit a fire in the wood stove and spent those days working on shop drawings and bid documents for the cement work.