The Big storm…..

Progress is being made on our house, and in fact they were supposed to be pouring the basement yesterday, except for a huge storm that was forecasted (which did end up coming true).

At about 5 pm, the sky became black, with a lot of lightening and ensuing thunder. Then the large hail stones came, and rain, lots of rain. Ken took some great pictures, it was pretty scary in a motorhome and poor tucker was hiding under the table.

Warning: expletive language. WHOOPS

It was brie,f but scary, we could not help but think of how nice it would be to sit and watch the storm in a house, warm and safe. Then we had to deal with diverting all the water away from the bank.

unfortunately it had already gouged out the bank in front of where the house will be. Still a long ways from the house to the bank, but we clearly need to work on this.

So we now can clearly see where the water will go in a storm and have a few plans to divert the water. I was thinking … an engineer would be able to determine where the water would go and prevent it. We can now see where the water DID go, and so we can change it for future storms. We seem to get the brunt of some of the storms.

Our garden did OK, I feel it is somewhat sheltered from the south winds, however the hail put holes in large leafed plants, and the onions seemed to just break off.

The garlic did OK, but there are low areas in the garden that the water seems to sit, and yesterday was no exception. The long dark rows are the potatoes, and they look great.

So here is the house, a week or so ago.

Then this is a few days ago, there is a “ledger board” screwed into the top of the concrete. this will form the basis to attach the “joist hangers” and subsequently the joists will be attached here. The purpose of this, is so that we can have a house that we can just walk out to level ground, with no step down going outside. These two guys showed up a few days ago to measure the tar area space. They had billed our builder for WAY more in square footage, and so they came back to measure…… it was odd, two guys in cowboy hats and measuring tapes just pulled in to the driveway. (I am sure they did not think anyone was actually living there )

so in this picture you can see that they have done a lot of levelling out the big piles of dirt from the basement dig.

I guess when we were having the plans drawn up we thought we would save money by building a small basement and the rest crawlspace, and the greenhouse area, just a slab. This has turned out to be completely wrong in that having 3 different levels in the basement it has complicated things quite a bit. I am sure adding a lot to the cost. I am sure that the apprentice builder is learning a lot with such a complex basement build.

We are continuing to cut rocks, in fact the saw is running all day, most days.

Ken is working on fence building and starting to act his age, and hired someone to dig the holes for the posts. We have just hired someone else, as a labourer to help with the fence posts. These posts are HUGE, we found them online in the fall, someone was selling them cheap, so we got them delivered here.