Category: Progress report

Time to Build, Less to Write

We’re having a big thunderstorm this afternoon.  Before this, the weather had been good enough for the past few weeks that much of the free time I might have spent blogging about the Little Rental House was instead spent building it.  This is one of the reasons things have been so quiet here lately.  The other is that I sank a whole lot of time into a long, detailed post about rainwater collection, which still isn’t finished, and so what writing I have done hasn’t gotten published.  I promise, I’ll get that one out soon.

In the mean time, a little status update:

  • The basement slab was poured on Aug 5th.
  • I now have all five of the I-beam floor supports in place and bolted down (the photo below only shows the first two).
  • The 1″ insulation around the basement walls is about 60% finished, but has slowed down because I’ve found I need to clamp the boards in place while gluing, and I only built one clamp apparatus.
  • I’ve measured, cut, and started mounting the stringers for the basement stairs.

Finishing up the slab

Staking My Claim

The phrase “staking a claim” started out as a literal description of an activity: marking a piece of land with stakes.  Today, the figurative returned back to its literal roots.  This post is now at the northeast corner of my building lot.

The surveyors went further and put in marks for the corners of the house – actually, offset by 5 feet from each corner to allow room for excavation.  These days, surveying is mostly done with differential GPS (DGPS) which has such remarkable precision that the surveying team was able to determine which of several marks on a nearby manhole (within an inch of each other) was their previous measurement reference.  Taking advantage of this, they put in large (2″x2″) stakes for the house corner offsets, and then repositioned the point of the GPS on top of the stake so they could mark a specific point within that 2″ square and put in a nail at the point.

This then allowed me to run strings (which unfortunately are barely visible in the photo) to mark the actual location of the house.

Today I also received a new excavation quote which is $5,600 lower than the previous one and includes all the materials, which is a huge improvement.

Just as exciting, my friend an neighbor Steve took delivery today of his new tractor, with which he’ll be starting a farm on the east end of our community’s land.

There’s other exciting news on the horizon, but for today I want to get this posted.  Pun, as usual, intended.