Slowly but Surely

Now that Shawn is back to work, the progress has slowed down. We were going to try to do one row per night, but it has been slower than we had hoped. It's a little more difficult to work with all of the braces in place and also, since it gets dark so early, it's harder to work at night.

Here's how the site looks at night:


When we come home, Shawn goes out to the house to work, while I watch Evan and make dinner. After Evan goes to bed around 7:30-8:00 pm, I go out there to help Shawn, and we usually work until 10:00 pm.

On Monday, we had to order some extra corner blocks because we counted what we had and realized that we were not going to have enough.

Monday night Shawn finished placing the last few braces, and began placing the planks on the scaffolds so we can work on the higher rows.
When I joined him, we had time to load up some more block and bring it inside the basement. And we did get almost all of the 4th row finished.

On Tuesday night, again, Shawn went out there right after getting home, and took a break to have dinner. We did go out there with Evan for a little bit and I managed to do a couple of things before Evan got tired and we went inside. Tuesday night we finished the 4th row, got the corner blocks tied and since the 4th row does not have horizontal rebar, we began on the fifth row. We got half of the fifth row done.

Last night Shawn decided that we were going to try and finish one wall. So he tied the corner blocks on the fifth row part that we had finished and bent and cut the rebar for it, and did the block for the sixth row. Here he is beginning and ending the the sixth row for the NE wall at the corners.














Notice Shawn has a stocking hat. It is getting cold and it's reminding us that snow is not that far away.

Evan and I came out to take some pictures, and we helped Daddy by handing him the block for the sixth row. That way he didn't have to climb up and down the step ladder. Evan helped me take the blocks to Daddy. He is such a great help, as you can see.


Then he sat down and waited for me to finish helping Daddy, before we went inside and got ready for bed.






When I came back to help Shawn, he had the NW wall up to the sixth row and was now working on the fifth row on the SW wall. So I helped him with that, and we have one more block left for that wall to be done to the fifth row.

We have 239 ft of wall to do for the basement (not counting the garage), and as of last night we have 67 ft up to the sixth row, 56 ft up to the 5th row, and the rest up to the 4th row. I did a little drawing for easier visual of our progress. Click on it to see it better:


Tonight we will work on getting the walk-out SE wall with all of the windows. It will be more difficult since we have to make sure we place extra rebar above the windows, and we have to cut all of those blocks to size.

My father in law, Derald, surprised us by telling us that he is joining us tomorrow to help (we must not have put him to work too hard last weekend). So we will be taking vacation, and with the three of us we can probably make good progress. Hopefully we can pour next week.

After the wall is poured, the framer will come and set the sole plate on top of the foundation to get the layout of the first floor square so that the truss supplier can come out and measure the sole plate. Then the trusses for the roof can be ordered to the right size. The framer will go on to work on another job, while we work with the plumber to get the plumbing work that goes under the basement floor done and then the flatwork contractor to get the slab poured.

So, we pray that we can have the framers back by the end of October so the house can be framed up.