It has been awhile since I updated you all on the house project. Sorry! Several thing have happened, so I’m going to put them altogether into this post. For my track record on consistently updating, and blogging in general hasn’t been so good lately this year.
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The next step was for the plumber to do a perk test of the soil. He dug 4 large holes in each corner of the clearing and his wife got down in them to do make her observations. Unfortunately, they all failed, which meant we had to have a mound system. Now we had 2 choices: 1,) do a mound system for the entire house, commercial kitchen and all for only $50,000 or 2.) a mound system for the house only and have a tank that is pumped on a regular basis for the commercial kitchen for $18,000 ($8,000 more than our quoted price). Guess which one we choose?
Before the mound could be done, however, the plans had to be state inspected. Since we have a commercial kitchen, it all had to be just so. That took 6 weeks for someone to stamp it with “approved”. Isn’t the government such a wonderful entity to work with? said no one ever! So the mound was started and completed in the first week of August.
This is where it got rough…. For the next 6 weeks we sat and sat and waited and waited some more for the dirt work to be done. They never came. Yes, it was rainy several of those days, but work still went on. That company still did other jobs. Just not ours. After giving them a deadline and the deadline passed with still not showing up, we hired our cement guy to do it. He often works with the local excavation company, so he was the only one we knew who could help at the last minute like that. I’m glad we did for he got things done!
There ended up having to be so much clay that needed removed that it took $26,000 worth of sand, which wasn’t in the budget, to be hauled in to replace it! That’s more than the lot cost!! (That price does included the labor, as well) ….. Once that sticker shock wore off & our heart beats returned to normal, we looked forward to the next stage of this house project.
The sand was packed down, smoothed out, and the forms were set up, ready for all the plumbing and in floor heat had to be laid out. That didn’t take 6 weeks a long time to do, thankfully.
Yay, it’s finally ready for the cement. It was fun to watch them!
It had been such a wet fall, and with so much clay under the top soil, the cement truck almost got stuck!
Here come the walls, all made from fir. Douglas fir, that is.
I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but our electrician backed out of this job after the closing. So we had to scramble to find another electrician! We contacted 5 companies, but only 2 answered us back, so we went with the cheaper of the 2. With the added amount of the mound system, all the dirt work, and this new electrician we are seriously over budget! Yikes!