Excavation Complete!

So much dirt, so much dust... Garage trenches...
Elia and Echo, walking in the trenches...One day I couldn't find her and she was out cruising along in her "tunnels". "Mom, I'm in the trenches!" she yells....Great.

Back of the house.
Don't worry, we're still finding time to have some fun!

The workers finished up excavating on Friday. We had to cut a some of the big roots belonging to the giant pine tree next to the house. We are hoping it will make it through all of this. It would be sad (and expensive!) to have to get rid of it after all is said and done. But we figured it was better to cut the roots and maybe have to cut the tree down, then to deal with a cracking foundation down the road.

Concrete work starts tomorrow. It will take them the rest of the week to do the form work and we'll pour next week. Should be exciting!

So what exactly are we doing...

This is the lower floor plan. This is the plan for the upper floors.

We bought our house a little over a year ago with the plan to fix it up. Eben and I spent many hours discussing what we thought would be fun to do with the house. He is good on the computer with AutoCAD, a drafting program, so we began to draw things out. We had to revise our original plan and scale things back a bit after we talked with an engineer. It would have required too much reinforcement of the exsiting structure. So, the plans began to really take shape. Eben spent countless hours on the computer putting our ideas into plans and then we sent them off to the engineer.
We are adding a 2 car garage with an upstairs. The upstairs will have a bedroom, bathroom, wetbar (or possibly kitchenette) and a living room area. The garage will connect to the existing house by a mudroom. The existing house will get a dormer upstairs allowing us to put in another bathroom. Then we will bump out the downstairs back wall. This will give us a lot more space in the great room area and the top of the bump out will be a deck for the master bedroom upstairs. We will redo the bathroom downstairs and the kitchen. All the interior walls need to redone, since they are covered in lovely wood paneling! Floors will be redone. We will also have to replace all the windows. We will reside the outside of the house, build a fence, landscape...am I forgetting anything! Are you confused yet?
So, it's a big project. We are adding about 1800 square feet! With Eben (and me) doing most of the work, it will be a long process. So this is just the beginning. At least we have made it this far. It is exciting to actually have broken ground.

Excavation

Excavation started on Saturday. The tractor had to pull out a bunch of stumps and then began to dig the trenches for the foundation. Oh how I love our front yard right now. Here's Elia sitting in our front door way.
Bye Bye decks!

And this is what's out our front door. Thankfully Eben built us some steps...good work dad!

And still it continues...We have had workers here the last couple of days straightening up the trenches and digging post holes. We've yet to make a descision on concrete. Will we do it ourselves or hire someone? We're lucky Eben knows how to deal with all this scheduling stuff and has some good contacts up here. We'd be lost without him!

Pregrade Inspection...

We had a frantic week getting ready for excavation to begin. Everyone was helping out. Eben even had Elia loading up concrete! He would come home from work and be out in the yard until dark all week. It made for a long week, but at least we had just gotten back from a vacation. We needed the extra energy we had stored up.

Getting Ready...

Clearing our lot...

We had so many trees to clear on our lot for fire protection and building reasons. Thankfully, Eben had a lot of experience with tree falling. We couldn't have done it all without the help of our friend Pete. Together they took down even the tallest trees. I was very impressed by Eb's tree cutting skills and bravery! We won't be worried about firewood for awhile!