Laurie's World

Well April showers (last night) made for a few puddles in the footing holes. Since we have no proper drainage on the back–or the front– of the house, the eaves are running striaght into the footings holes…that and the rain in general made for some muddy work today. But not my problem right?? Other than the muddy footprints from the garage door to the washroom. (only a few steps really) We are letting the guys use our washroom to save the neighborhood the beautiful view of a honey bucket. Well 7:30 am came early when the guys showed up and started using their power tools and air compressors to finish up what they needed to do to get the forms done for the inspection. The pump truck and cement delivery were scehduled for 3:30 sharp. So the inspector came–named Randy–hoping this is not a sign of anything ominous. He is a real joker actually—knows all about our project, he knows our neighbor, AND he knows Andrew–which is great–he barely even glanced at the work…so I have lost my eagle eye, which I was kinda counting on as i am just a lowly homeowner who knows nothing more than the 22 books i have read to date on footings, foundations and framing

So he said all he needs is some pictures of the work in the crawl space (when it is complete) as he has complete confidence in Andrew’s skill set–he has NO intention of going down there. I told him we have a very nice crawl space…he passed on the opportunity!

They spray the wooden forms with diesel fuel so that the wood will separate from the concrete easier when they are stripping it. OK, I understand the motivation to salvage as much of the wood as neccesary as apparently it is $35 per 2 foot section (or something like that), but THAT SMELLS. Troy says it smells like the shop in Dawson…but I can think of lots more ways to take him back to his childhood than this. How about cookies in the kitchen or something??

The BIG event of the day was the very cool pump truck event. I took some video and Brooklyn swears she can teach me how to put it on this blog…so that may come yetPhotos do not do the event justice…video may not either. There was this ginormous (is that a word) truck with a long boom that was down on the road on the west side of the house at the bottom of the hill. It had what had to be a 100 foot boom on it with a pipe that reached all the way across our property to pump the concrete out of a tube into all the foundation forms. The guy who brought the truck had this little joystick box strapped to his belly and he moved the boom with the flick of his thumb while he walked around the yard. He ws pretty excited (NOT) about me video taping…but I am just a homeowner–what can I say! As always, I am easily impressed by big sexy powerful tools, so this was way cool. Then the yucky part—Andrew got to play in the concrete–Dave manned the tube and where it was spewing concrete, and Andrew got to spread it out and level it. We had a fun little discussion while we were waiting for the concrete truck (and Dave) to arrive about the foundation being level. He assures me it is all going to be level, he has a "chalk line" on the form to follow that he laid out earlier in the day after they were built. We also did discuss the reality being, that since he has to frame on his own foundation, the motivation to have it level is pretty high. Hmmm…I will let you know how it ends up

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Reno. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.