Over a year ago we began our house project. We spent the long winter nights working on the design with my sister, and the short cold days in the woods cutting down trees and hauling them to our property to be cut up when the sawmill arrived. The days went by, and when winter turned into spring and then into summer, our friend Roy offered to dig our foundation.
Jason and I spent hours analyzing our house site: Which direction exactly should we place the windows so we can gain the most passive solar energy? How close are we to the right-of-ways? What about my gardens--where will they go, will they have enough sun? After a lot of debating we settled on just where to place our house. We measured out the dimensions of the house and placed stakes at each corner, Jason calculating every angle twice. When those orange-flagged stakes were finally in the ground I remember running around the staked-out house, imagining just where my kitchen would be, just where the sun would stream through the windows into
our living room, just where I'd sit in front of the woodst
ove and warm my toes in the winter.
Roy began to dig in early June. It took him about a week to dig it completely with his backhoe.
After digging and digging and digging, Jason began to work on compacting the foundation floor and preparing the basement for the footing and foundation walls. We had an abnormally wet summer, and Jason worked in that wet hole for weeks, moving rocks and shoveling dirt to make things just right. At times we both felt like it was endless, we would never be ready to move out of the hole. One evening I sat on a dirt pile next to the hole, covered in mud, crying in the rain. At that point we had spent weeks trying to dry out the hole and get materials in place to make the ground stable. That evening it seemed like it would never stop raining and that we would never be finished prepping for the foundation. But somehow the sun finally came out, the hole began to dry out, and the time came to layout the footing materials. How we celebrated! We used Form-A-Drain for this portion of the project. It's a plastic form that acts as a mold for the footing and a permanent drain for the future basement. Inch by inch Jason laid out the Form-A-Drain, making sure it was level.
One day in the late summer, after carefully making sure the form was level and secure, Bill and Cory came over to help us pour the footing. The day began with waiting for the cement truck to arrive on the barge. Jason and I couldn't keep still. He must have walked around the footing a million times, checking his prep work. I chewed all of my nails off. Jason had explained to me a million times how important this piece of the foundation is. It's what will support the whole rest of the house. If we didn't get this right, the next stage would be that much harder and take that much more time. We were both imagining all of the terrible things that could happen. Maybe the form wouldn't be strong enough. Maybe it would burst and the cement would gush out. Maybe....
Finally the truck arrived and Jason led them up to the house site. Bill, Cory, Jason and I jumped down into the hole, and slowly the cement began to flow from the truck. We waited at the end of the trough for the stuff to roll down, shovels and rakes in hand, and quicker than we were ready, it began to pour into the footing. We hustled around, pushing and pulling the cement around the form. The day was hot. Our arms, legs and backs began to ache, but we continued to move around the form--we didn't really have a choice.
We made it almost halfway around the foundation when we had a blowout. This is what we had been afraid of happening. All of Jason's careful measuring and leveling were now ruined, and the cement was oozing from the busted section of the form, costing us time, energy and money with each glob. There was a moment when I just wanted to cry, and I think Jason would have, too, but we didn't have time. Jason ran to find some plywood to fix the blowout and Cory, Bill and I began to pull cement from the hole as quickly as we could. I felt so overwhelmed. The cement seemed even heavier, and I could not imagine how Jason would make this alright. As I continued to pull that thick stuff around the form, the guys worked away, too but I don't remember much except my thoughts and worry. Somehow the hole was plugged up and we were able to continue with the rest of the form. By the end of the afternoon we had a footing, for better or worse.
Thank goodness our friends were there to help us. Jason and I never would have been able to do this section by ourselves. Thank you so much to Bill and Cory for your help.
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