Almost. Maybe. Probably real soon now.
This is probably going to be a rather disjointed post; a lot has happened since I posted last month. As I write this in early October, we are quietly optimistic that our house will be "done" by October 15. Why so specific? Our monthly rent here at the RV park is up on the 15th, and we'd really rather not pay another month's rent. Even if the house isn't liveable, if the utilities are in, we are gone from the RV park. We can legally park and live on the property, since we already own it outright.
So much has happened with the construction of the house that it's nearly impossible to capture it all, at least without boring you to death. Here are the key points:
1. There is electricity to the house, although it hasn't been turned on yet. (Not sure why, though... we keep getting vague answers on that)
2. We managed to get AT&T to splice in a new phone line under our driveway, at no cost to us. This, after our grading contractor dug a new, deeper trench for the new line - at a cost to us. All in all, though, this was a net win for us: it'll cost us about half what AT&T quoted us.
3. The septic tank installation has been completed and backfilled. The back half of our lot has been graded. The front part plus the driveway won't be done until work on the house is nearly done; driving big trucks up and down the driveway really beats it up.
4. Our garage and porch, which are both conventional, stick-built additions, are getting completed. They really add a lot to the house, in terms of both functionality and adding dimension to the front of the house.
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| Here's the porch. The deck will have Trex matching the small, built-in porch that's barely visible. |
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| The garage... and a huge trash pile. |
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| This is an older pic, showing more of the front of the house. |
5. The Wall - This could probably be a post all by itself. Several weeks ago, our contractor - who is a great guy - approached us about building a "small" retaining wall. We intentionally had our house built as far to one side of the lot as possible. We did this in order to leave room for a driveway around the other side. Basically, the house is shoved as far east as we could; since the land slopes east to west, this necessitated a cut about five feet tall right up against the property line. Building code requires that this cut be backed with a retaining wall.
We're talking about stackable block that you can buy at any big-box hardware store. I had experience using these in Ohio, building a number of planters on sloping ground.
Like fools, we agreed to take this on. Our original thoughts were that this would be a wall about 40' long and maybe 2-1/2 or 3 feet high. Wrong.
First of all, when we factored in the depth of the porch - an additional 8', plus the slopes in the cut, the wall ended up being just under 60' long. But that's not all.
A week or so before we were going to to this, our contractor said that to do this right we should lay down a 6" bed of fill (crushed gravel) plus a 6" bed of sand. We did some calculations and that worked out to about a ton of each.
One last tidbit from our contractor: "You really should set a perforated drain pipe, buried in 6-12" of gravel, behind that wall before you backfill any soil, for good drainage."
We got a little lucky with the gravel and sand... I think. A local sand and gravel company sells this stuff literally dirt-cheap. The only hitch is that they charge a fortune for deliver. Fortunately, the Beast - a so-called one ton truck - can in fact handle nearly a ton-and-a-half of total payload. Using our truck saved us over $500 in delivery fee... on sand and gravel that cost us right at $100. Of course, we had to unload it ourselves!
So, Rick and Cathy, a pair of 68-year-olds, hauled and spread a one-ton load of gravel and then a one-ton load of sand... all in the same day!
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| Putting the Beast to work! |
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| This is just the base of crushed gravel. A ton of sand was leveled on top of this. |
The next day we started setting the previously delivered block. We set and leveled a couple of courses of block, then hauled and spread 1.3 tons of 3/4" gravel, the drainage line, and a couple more courses of block. We finally ran out of gas, quitting when we still had another 3-4 courses of block to set - plus backfill with dirt.
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| You can see we still have a ways to go... this is too low. |
Surprisingly, we were able to move the next day without too much drama. We put a couple of courses of block on the wall and shoveled some more dirt. Both of us felt we needed a couple more rows to get the height up where it should be, but we'd had enough for the day. We ended up waiting until the next weekend to finish things up.
It wasn't until we moved over half the block that I checked: they weigh 23 pounds apiece. We moved over 550 of them... for a total block weight of over 12,600 pounds, or 6.3 tons!
So, this whole project required that we move about ten TONS of material! I'm glad we did it - it turned out nice and we're both proud of the work, and I am sure we saved a ton (pun intended!) of money, but, Oh, Lord, it was a lot of work!
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| The finished wall! |
We are having our flooring installed this week. The well guys are supposed to finish their work this week, as well - we think. The garage and porch should be done this week, or early next week - we think. A lot has to happen before the 15th!
