House lowering in 5 days!
Well, it's been a crazy last couple of weeks. Thank you to Garney Hayward and his crew for working in lousy weather, including snow to get the foundation done. You don't really think about what your house is sitting on.... then when you see the intricacies of how it is actually done, you realize what a huge job it is to have a foundation and crawl space.
Knowing the house was going to be lowered soon, Jim was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with all that still needed to be done under the house to get it ready. So it was time to throw out the 'help' signal and get a 'Work Bee' going. It was awesome.
Gravel needed to be shoveled under the house and packed between the foundation walls ready for the floor of the crawl space to be poured. (This took 4 guys 8 hours to do... a big job.) The forms had to be built around the cribbing that the house is sitting on so the crawl space floor doesn't glue the cribbing there forever! :) All of the nails sticking pointy side down above everyone's heads from when the top floor of the house had been cut from the lower floor of the house had to be cut off with a grinder so the crawl space doesn't inadvertently become an 'Iron Maiden' ha ha ha. I think Hunter Austring thoroughly enjoyed the task.... using a grinder and letting sparks fly... a cool job for a teenage boy! The deck on the back that Nickel Bros so kindly saved for us had to be cut off to make room for the breezeway that will be connected to the back of the house with the laundry and mudroom. (We'll use the lumber in another project down the road.) Then the pony walls under the house have to be added for support on top of the foundation as well as sill plates attached to the foundation for the house to be lowered onto.
The guys all helped outside and the ladies came and helped clean inside. So after 2 long days, and lots of awesome friends helping, inside the house every surface has been cleaned and outside the sill plates and pony walls are the only things remaining to be done. Which is awesome because we got a phone call on Friday afternoon that they were able to move our house lowering from Nov 22nd to this coming Thursday Nov 16th. :) Yeahhhhhh.
We even got to have our first meal in the house.... it was cooked in the trailer and carried into the house, but it still felt pretty awesome!
Still lots of things to do once the house is lowered, but we are getting there! The weather has been pretty lousy, rain, snow, below 0 temperatures, but we are staying warm in the trailer and look out every morning to our little house. Soon... soon we will be in our little house, looking out on the trailer! I can't wait!
