First you dig a hole, then you fill it in.

Over the last week my friend Len has been using his excavator to dig the hole for the new house. Topsoil is deep in these parts and all that ground had to be moved out of the way. We were not yet in a super rush and he could do the digging after his other work and on weekends. It worked for us. He dug up and moved well over a thousand cubic yards of dirt. It is piled on two sides of the old house in massive piles and will be used to shape the grounds when the new house is done. Tonight the last scoop of dirt came out of the massive hole.

Tomorrow the engineer will come to take a look and let us know if we can start to fill the hole back in. We won't be filling it back in with dirt of course but rather proper aggregates. It will all be packed into place with a large mechanical roller as per the engineer's instructions.

We may just get the building permit tomorrow as well. Here's hoping...

-grampa dan

Picture this

I have the ability to simply imagine something and even seeing it completely finished in my mind's eye. Janis has to see to believe. When we are doing a project like the house we have plenty of show and tells along the way to bring her up to speed and keep her in the loop. Today I assembled a few of the window bucks (forms) which mimick the final window sizes. I set things up, carefully measured and then used a felt pen to draw lines on the forms showing where the window frames would be, and where the glass would start. The two largest windows of the house are circular, with multiple panels making up the whole. Then I gave Janis a call so she could really see just how things would be when we were done.

I also provided a place we could kneel to view the mocked up windows for they would start two feet off the floor. Any fears the windows might be too small vanished in an instant for she didn't have to imagine the size any longer. While we were at it I showed her a few of the other windows as well. Janis' verdict. Perfect! Keep building!

-grampa dan

Window bucks cut

A critical part of the wall assembly in our new house are the window bucks or forms that will be set into the wall LOGIX ICF (insulated concrete forms) before the concrete is poured around it. Because the window bucks have a lot of arches and curves they needed to be built exactly as the windows. I will first build mock windows from laminated plywood which were a half inch oversize. These will be used to shape the bucks and also help reinforce them during the pour. They will be removed to make room for the windows when the concrete is cured. We used our MultiCam CNC router to cut the plywood pieces from which we would build these shapes. We cut sixty four pieces using twenty-five sheets of half inch plywood. The CNC router did the task in less than two hours.

I assembled one test window buck using 2x4's as spacing. Now that the test is complete and successful the rest of the twenty three window forms will follow.

-grampa dan