Work continued this past Friday and Saturday. Unfortunately we hit ledge under the garage. At first we thought it would be easy to hammer out because it is red sand stone, however, it wasn’t, and we spent quite of bit of time (and money) making slow progress. At this point, the plan is to pour the footing on top of ledge.
Today, we successfully connected to the water and sewer lines.
The next steps are to pour the footings and the stem walls. I got an estimate from one contractor: $8000 for the house foundation and $3750 for the garage foundation. The concrete represents about $4000 of the cost. Tomorrow I will be experimenting and looking into doing the footing and stem wall myself.
Garage excavation
Scraping the Ledge
Ready for footing
There was a problem getting the hammer to work on the mini-excavator. During the downtime I got my first lesson on operating a back hoe!
For no particular reason the hammer worked after I got the back hoe lesson. We hypothesized that there was air in the hydraulic line that bled out.
It turns out that the pipes we clipped at the northeast corner of the foundation actually were connected to our water and sewer lines. The black plastic 1" pipe is underneath the roll of copper.
Old clay sewer pipe. We had trouble locating this pipe--partly because we thought we were looking for PVC not VC (Vitrified clay). The folks from the DPW, who you would think have seen it all, were very surprised by the size of the clay pipe as well as the fact that it was connected to unknown pipes.
Our new sewer connection
Turning on the water
We have water!
Design & Construction of Spartan & Hannah's Home 