Tag: House construction

Well, the foundation is done, and you can get a better feel for the layout now.

This is from the same position as some of the other views. The hillside is cut away much further than before.

Across the back of the house (L-R) is the back bedroom, the kitchen and the master bedroom, all overlooking the lake/pond.

This is the view from the front door, looking through the Living Room and Kitchen out over the lake. The backhoe is parked in the garage.

Finally, the last view is a panorama, with the sun getting ready to set behind the barn and trailer.

I’m not sure how much you can blow this up. Below is the same picture at a much higher density

I’ll post the time-lapse photos to the Dropbox account later.

UPDATE – It looks like the program trims both large and small photos when uploaded.

Once the footings were poured and dried for a day it came time to put the rebar in and to frame the foundation walls. The below series shows the sequence of construction on 5 April 2020.

In other good news, I have been off the wired grid for about 36 hours. Now the weather has been optimum, clear and mostly cloudless during the day, but I discovered the secret is to shut down the trailer breaker after sunset to go on the trailer batteries. After the sun comes back up, about 8:30-9:00AM, I can power the trailer back up and use PV cells to recharge the main batteries and trailer battery. I may need another 48V main battery to get through prolonged cloudy weather/winter gloom, but things are looking hopeful.

I finally got my potatoes planted. I have tried a variety of planting methods to see how they will fare.

The first method is using 5-gallon buckets. I had tried something similar using large pots on my deck in Portland and have reviewed numerous You Tube videos like HERE or HERE. Below is the process I used.

The first step is to drill holes in the bucket to ensure drainage. If the potatoes sit in prolonged damp they will rot.

Since I have a large amount of straw available (bales and bales by the house) I put some in the bottom of the bucket to enhance the drainage. For those of us of a certain age, holes in the bucket and straw bring to mind a song.

I put some potting soil, manure, and sandy soil in the buckets and and put the seed potato chunks in and filled in more soil. In addition to the buckets, I also planted some of the pieces in traditional rows so I could get a good comparison with bucket grown potatoes.

On a completely unrelated topic they are pouring the footings for the walls today, Note, that these are 4 feet below the grade level to ensure they are below the frost line. I have labelled the pictures below so you can relate the pictures of footings to the floor plan. Note that there are some changes to the floor plan; the garage is rotated 90 degrees to make access easier, and we’ve simplified the roof-line on the bedroom end.

We have broken ground on my new house! The date of first dirt moved is 28 April 2022.

As you can see, to put the house where I wanted it, we have to dig out a piece of one hill. Also since the footings need to be about 4 feet down to be below the frostline, they will be moving a lot of dirt.

Expecting concrete footings to be poured next week.