Thanksgiving Weekend

From left to right, the front door, the window in Worth's office, the window in the laundry room.

From left to right, the window above the tub in the master bath, the window in my sewing room/den, the front door, the window in Worth's office.

The floor trusses have been installed on the deck and it's being used to store building materials.

Marie and Sadie found their way down to the creek. We'll need to work at making new paths once construction is finished.

There will be room to walk between the deck and the creek bank.

They've done a lot more grading since we were here a month ago. We were really pleased at how level the creek side is. There will be just a few steps at each end of the deck.

Still plenty of standing room in the "crawl space." We got to admire the support beams.

Randy met us at the building site and we made a few decisions about questions that had come up.

View from the Deck

Just so you all know, nothing has changed about the view of the creek. This is still the wonderful view upstream (taken from about where the breezeway was).

Additional pictures

These aren't really new - probably represent still things as they looked last week - but they show some other views of the fill (as well as the floor trusses, which we are told are going in this week, what with all the great weather).

The picture above shows about where the garage will be - notice all the new fill to the front of the house; the front porch comes off the "notch" you see in the top right of what you can view of the foundation here.

This view shows the fill in front of the house - in about the center you can see one of the four "sonotubes" that the front porch will be resting on. We're still not sure what the front yard will look like - hopefully not a valley or bath-tub! We believe they will fill straight out to the road. They've got to put the septic field in first (it goes in the front yard). Then they can add as much fill as we want to that. We are purchasing the fill directly from the mine you see along the Cane River near the turn off to the Bolens Creek road. It's actually a by-product of the gravel crusher, so we get it at a good price, not to mention the hauling is much cheaper. Kinda neat we are recycling local resources!

This shows how the fill extends now to the new creek bank. The deck is just a bit above the sonotubes you see here, so there is not a big drop off from the deck to the ground. The sonotubes and the foundation represent an engineered construction that is considered highly flood resistant. The house itself, including the floor trusses, is one foot above the 100 year flood level, and the foundations are literally attached to the earth, so the water can get high without washing out the foundations. Not cheap, but the right investment for the future.

Lots of Backfilling

Randy just sent us these photos from the job site. What a lot of progress since we were there a week ago. They were able to use fill from a nearby gravel pit to smooth out the inside of the crawl space and all of the area along the creek bank. They'll do more work in the front yard after the septic system is in.