Our basement has walls!

We went up to the hill the evening after the footers were completed and marveled at the amount of concrete and stone that will be keeping our cabin secure and dry!


Mick was especially excited (probably because he knows better than I do the consequences of a poor foundation and poor drainage).


As you can see, they had already laid out the forms they would use for the basement walls.


The forms went up in short order the next day. The walls were so tall! It was hard to see over them, and rather impossible to climb over. I'm afraid I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how the masons got in and out of the basement, until Mick pointed out the ladder. DUH! :)


The next day they put in the three windows, as well as the door frame for the bottom end of the bilco door. [You can see the door and one of the windows on the far wall in this picture.]


They added the forms for the interior of the basement walls and poured! (They also set up this handy plank for walking up to the top of the wall). :)


They had also poured concrete for the sono tubes, which will hold the posts for the porch.


We weren't quite in our house yet, but being on it is a pretty good start!


When we arrived to the hill Tuesday morning, they were loading the forms back onto the truck.


Which meant that our walls could stand on their own!!


When we were on our way home, Mick said, We stood in our house today. It hadn't sunk in for me until then.


We are pretty excited!

Footers

Today we set foot in our home for the first time!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. So the Murdocks had set the stage for Gary Davis and his crew of masons.


The masons began their expert work on the morning of November 1, which also happened to be the first morning we woke up to snow accumulation! They laid out the perimeter footer...


...then the footers for the basement posts. We have loved working with Gary (in the picture below).


They cut the rebar to set into the footers.


They suspended the rebar in the perimeter footers, but for the post footers they just dropped the rebar into the footer after the cement was poured.


They also set up footers for the porch posts, using cut-off old metal barrels.


Then they called in the cement truck. They backed him up reeeeeeal close to the edge of the basement hole. I (Sarah) was too nervous to watch :) but the ground guide certainly knew what he was doing (and probably wanted the truck to end up in the hole even less than I did).


We were enjoying watching the process unfold, and at one point Gary commented, "Beats a wheelbarrow!" The cement traveled out of the truck...


...up the conveyor belt...


...through the chute...


...to its new home.


Gary and one of his workers used shovels to roughly level the cement, and a third man smoothed it out. We couldn't believe how quickly and efficiently they worked their way around the footer!


We also couldn't believe how quickly and well he was able to smooth out the cement. I think it was about at this point that Mick commented (in response to my disbelief at what a great and quick job they were doing!), "This is why we pay them the sixteen thousand dollars."


We also enjoyed watching the cement truck operator use his rickety control panel to put the concrete exactly where it needed to be.


It was quite an impressive operation!

The basement materializes

The morning after the Delivery, we went up and discovered that excavation had already begun!


Tim Murdock is the contractor we have been working with for the excavation. We had met his father, John, who started the business almost 50 years ago, when he came up to clear the stumps off the building site. Today we met his son, who was measuring the depth of the basement as his grandfather dug.


It was amazing how cleanly John was able to dig a corner with that monster of a machine!


And it is still incredible to us that such a frail-looking old man can wield a mighty excavator with such expert finesse.


When they finished digging out the basement, they poured gravel between the end of the driveway and the building site so that the concrete trucks would be able to back in close.


Mick was very pleased by the perimeter drain to daylight, to think of all that moisture being moved away from the foundation so efficiently. This is the house side of the drain...


...and the daylight side.


The excavators had finished this phase of the work and were ready for the masons to come in to do the footers.