Shoveling gravel!

We had a 5 yard gravel delivery come when no one was around. Of course it was dumped in the wrong place. The family and I spent the day moving the gravel to the right spot. Nothing like a good day of hard labor shoveling rocks to keep the family together!

Gravel up on the building pad.

Gravel now spread on the driveway with my little helper on top

Whats left of the gravel on the pad

How the driveway looked when complete

On site with another SIP build.. (not my house)

Yesterday I went and visited a site that was using SIP's for their walls because I was curious as to how these panels go together. Below is a photo sequence showing them putting up 2 panels.  With this method an entire house's exterior walls can go up in a day or two.  Just to be clear this is not my house.  We're probably 2 months from being to this point with my project.

one person carrying a small panel

making sure the first panel is plum

Laying mastic and inserting panel on top of 2x6 on subfloor

Ensuring panel is sitting correctly

squaring panel before nailing

Screwing the panel in place

Applying mastic & standing up next panel

clicking the next one into place etc...

Just seeing this one go up so fast gives me confidence that I made the right choice going with SIP's. A couple of people can raise all the perimeter walls in a day or so.

Timelapse Construction

We put a time lapse camera on a tree to test the location. It was set to 1 picture per hour. The total video represents a week of captures. I think its about the right rate for a multi month video. As you can see there wasn't much activity at the site the past week.

Boulders!

They looked much bigger at the landscape supply store.. 7887lbs worth.

Weekend Panoramas - Week 2

 

From road up..



Looking uphill

Final Grading

Some pictures of our final grading work.

Driveway with a truck on it!

Laying out for foundation work

Grading with backyard cuts

Soil conditions

One interesting aspect of how engineers decide on how deep piers must be dug is based on soil conditions. These recommendations are usually based on small soils samplings taken by a soils engineer.

Once those tests are done the structural engineering is based on those results. Now in our case we have specced some pretty deep peers partly because we are ignoring the top 4 feet of soil as being expansive clay. Once the site is excavated you can clearly see the composition of the layers and how deep they are. Based on what we actually see now we're going to try and see if we can ammend those recommendations because the clay appears to be very shallow. So shallow that almost all the clay is gone from the initial excavation work. I'm hoping this can save us some time and money for the foundation work. We're having the soils engineer come out to take a look. Wish us luck!

The picture below shows a cross section of depth of the unmolested hill. the dark dirt is clay the light is sandstone. note how the small roots are above the sandstone layer.

driveway section

Day 3

Driveway taking shape



Almost all dug out already...

Day 2

Driveway

Crater for the house

Got mail!

Our first letter for our new mailbox.

Dig Dug

Diggin the driveway..

Mailbox is up

Last weekends project complete !

It has begun!

excavator on the lot!

excavator on the way up