Month: June 2019

Ground Breaking News

I am now the proud owner of a big hole in the ground and several huge piles of dirt.

Additionally, at the far corner, you can see a couple of white drain pipes that will carry water away from the foundation (footer drains) and from overflow from rainwater collection, and dump them above the level of the nearby retention pond.  In contractor speak, these are referred to as “daylight drains” because they can see daylight at the downstream end; they don’t need a sump pump because they drain above ground just by gravity.

Excavation began at about 9am on Monday, when it looked like this:

Using the survey stakes set earlier, Enslow Landscaping1 dug about 7′ into the ground with about 3′ of extra space on the outside of each wall as working space for the foundation contractors.  The picture at the top was shot at just before 4pm.  Not bad for a day’s work, right?

Shortly afterward, it rained, and then I had several inches of water in the bottom of the hole.  My cat Zephyr decided to check it out.  (Curiosity and all that… I don’t think he’d die if he’d fallen in, but he would have gotten very wet.)

Then somewhere around 11pm on Tuesday night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I noticed something on reflection that I should have seen while it was right in front of me.  There was no excavation done for the stairs that go down to the basement!  I sent them a text, and they came back today (Friday) to address this and also to adjust the drains to get rid of the standing water.  Within a few hours (between 9:30am and 1pm) they had both issues fixed.

  1. I’d give the Enslow team a link, but like so many small construction businesses, they barely even do email much less have a web presence! ↩

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.