Meeting with the Builders

Worth stood on what will be the covered part of the deck to take this photo of Sadie. We love this view of the creek!

For this photo Worth was standing in the old driveway. It gives a pretty good idea of the distance of the house from the road. Not only will the pile of dirt under the track loader be used to fill around the house. We'll also have many loads of fine fill brought in from the gravel mine on the Cane River to even out the yard to about road level. Then the final foot or two will be topsoil which will be brought over from Burnsville. Finding a close source of cheap fill for the bulk of the leveling will be a big money saver! We met Keith, the track hoe operator. He's full of great ideas and has years of experience working on mountain homes. He'll be selecting some boulders to use to fill holes on the creek bank. Others he'll set aside for us to use in our landscaping.

Here Randy Banks and Edwin Crowder are discussing a question we had raised. We noticed that the opening between the kitchen and the great room had seemed smaller than we had envisioned. We asked if it could be opened up by using posts rather than walls to support the bonus room corner above. They talked it over and decided it won't be a problem. A compromise will be that the countertop between the kitchen and the great room will now be at two levels-- counter height on the kitchen side and bar height on the great room side. That allows for the electrical service to be in the back-splash.

The next step will be for the crawl space area to be filled with a few inches of gravel to even off the floor. First they'll remove any small boulders still inside. Not the large boulder in the middle though! As Edwin says, that one is connected to the world. The sonotubes next to it are actually drilled into it. Once the crawl space is leveled off, the floor joists will be put into place. Then they'll do the initial part of the back fill around the foundation. Workers were busy yesterday coating the outside of the foundation with a moisture sealant.