Monday Foundation Update

The temperature today in Omaha was hot-hot-hot but that didn't stop the foundation contractor from putting in a 12 hour day!  They arrived before 7AM to try and finish setting up the concrete forms.  It now looks like they will spend Tuesday refining the forms' placement and then pour the concrete on Wednesday morning.

Here are some photos to show the progress!  (Thanks for writing the captions, Scott!)

 Another view from the southwest with the garage forms now in view.

Concrete's-eye view inside of the form, before it turns from liquid to solid. 

Then the forms can split to the next job.

 Wrap-around porch stoop, which will have a brick wall on top to transition the old into the new.

 View to the west near the transition from porch to garage on right.

 View looking southwest from between barn and corn crib

Looking northeast from west of the Great Room

Big Boom Truck!

Our poor yard has been taking a beating from the heavy equipment we've seen so far.  

Stay Tuned for More Updates!

Rock Solid progress on the addition this week...

Kristin asked me to post about the progress on the footings and foundation walls this week. I'll try to make up for my lack of blogging skills with hard facts, statistics, and interseting technical snippets from my observations...yeah... OK, now on to the pictures...

After work on Wednesday, July 11.....View of footings below basement level which will support the connector walls between the existing house on left and the new garage to the right. A new stairway will go down to the new basement just to the left of the footing.

Over 30 cubic yards of pretty grey 4000 psi concrete were poured to create the 24" wide x 12" deep footings which will keep the new addition steady. The footings sit under the concrete walls of the basement and garage.

The new basement floor will be lower than the existing 1920 & 1972 basements, so part of the soil under the existing footings is now exposed prior to pouring the new reinforced concrete basement walls. New concrete walls will abut and permanently retain the exposed soil under the existing brick & block basement walls. Lucky for us, the house sits on Loess soil of very high bearing capacity. Loess has the ability to be cut vertically for short periods without slumping, as long as it stays dry. If it gets wet, it could lose its strong cohesion and crumble, and eventually turn back into very fine powder. We could not have asked for better weather this summer to dig a basement. Sorry, farmers:  please don't pray for rain until the walls are poured! Loess is actually bedrock that was scraped off and pulverized by glaciers during previous ice ages, the last of which was over 12,000 years ago. As the glaciers melted and receded back north, the fine powdery Loess was washed by massive floods into the river valley, and during dry periods, blown back out in huge dust storms which caused difts up to 300 feet deep on both sides of the river valley. The Loees hills are what makes noTTafarm such a great place to live, but we have to be careful because Loess is highly erodable once it is left exposed.

Looking east at the connector basement.

Friday morning, July 13.....The Rock Solid Poured Walls Co. truck gets ready to unload the aluminum forms

Boom truck sets down the first stack of forms

Looking southeast toward the northwest corner of the new Greatroom basement. The window well walls will go all of the way down below the basment floor level, even though the egress window sills will be at approximately 42" above the floor.

View looking southwest inside the Greatroom basment. I kind of like the way the foms look, maybe they'll let us keep them instead of using plain old boring painted drywall.

View of basement window opening. The wood will ceate a void in the formwork so the concrete will not fill in where the window opening needs to be. Beats cutting the concrete out later, obviously. Note how the inside of the forms have a brick texture which a lot of people prefer over smooth concrete (which is debatable.)

View from basement looking back up at existing house. Remaining forms & racks occupy much of the floor space for now.

Looking East

View down from the existing first floor dining room, soon to become the new kitchen.

The existing walls were covered by the contractor with plastic for protection, in case it rains..... not in the forecast for the next several days but I'll sleep better tonight.

Stay tuned for more progress....they're planning to set up the rest of the forms in the connector and garage areas on Monday and pour the walls on Tuesday ---Scott

Empty Hole Transformed with Footings Infrastructure

True to their word, the foundation contracting crew arrived bright and shiny this morning.  They brought along a big load of rebar and a John Deere backhoe to help complete the day's work.

The view this morning from our bedroom window.

At lunchtime, Scott came home to check the progress.  He was amazed at how quickly things were moving! Too bad he "forgot" to take pictures.  He was even more excited to report that the utility company had been out to begin their task of relocating the electrical service!  Scott took a bunch of pictures when he returned home after work.  Let's check them out!

The stakes and blue spray paint I told you about yesterday have been replaced by a deep trench outlining the structure.  Rebar was placed in the center of the trench.  Concrete will be poured into the trench (possibly on Wednesday) to create 2 foot wide x 1 foot deep footings.

A detail shot of how the rebar is wired together

The west end of the basement under the great room is at right.

Footing trench on the east edge (eventual front) of the garage.

Remember how the utility company was here, too?  Here's proof!  They hauled in a pad-mount transformer which will replace the current transformer mounted high up on the pole in front of the garage. 

I don't know what's inside this big green box . . . suffice it to say that some sort of magic happens and we get to have TV and lights inside the house!  (I apologize to my engineering co-workers for showing my ignorance.)  The transformer's new home is northwest of the back corner of the garage.

We're not messing around, folks!  noTTafarm is full of danger!

Luckily, Bibbers is here to protect us.

At the very top of this photo, you can see the electric pole that sits at the very east edge of our property.  From that point, OPPD dug a trench all the way to the new transformer.  Inside that trench, they placed a big fat cable (about 1" wide) that will carry 8000 volts of electricity underground to the transformer, where it will be stepped-down to household voltage, rather than overhead from pole to pole.  They hit a snag, however, near the culvert midway along the driveway.  Ginormous chunks of concrete and asphalt will have to be hauled away!  If these chunks could talk, they could tell us what highway they comprised in their glory days.

Stay Tuned for Our Next Adventure!

Finally . . . a Glimmer of Hope in the Dirt

Like the majority of the country the last week or so, Omaha has suffered under the weight of a nasty heat wave, capped by a record-setting 104 degrees on Friday, July 6th.  Adding to our misery here at noTTafarm is the absolute lack of any activity at the job site.  The huge, dusty hole that will someday be a basement has been undisturbed so long that new life has sprung up from the roots of the chopped-down locust tree!

Luckily, the heat wave broke apart Saturday and temps seemed to have returned to "normal".

As I explained in last week's post, we have been waiting for the removal of the transformer and electric pole by the utility company. The foundation contractor was hesitant to begin his work with the pole still in the way.  So after 10 days of nothing, we learned today that the utility company has requested that the basement walls be poured first so that they can accurately locate the electric service entrance and future electrical panel location in the new basement.

Long story short - Today, the foundation contractor staked the corners and outlined the trench locations of the footings with blue spray paint, and tomorrow the concrete work begins!  Hooray!

Weee!  At least it looks like progress with the addition of wooden stakes and blue paint!

Stay Tuned for Details of Tuesday's Progress!

But don't hold your breath...just in case.  

This "hurry up and wait" process can drive a girl crazy!

Fun with PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a free on-line photo editing web site that is super easy to use.  I've been playing around with it a lot lately, and thought it would be fun to create artistic images from some otherwise-lovely cloud photos I took this evening.  I played with the color saturation, exposure, and added a texture or two on top.

Example 1:  SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera)

 Example 1:  After Editing

Example 2:  SOOC 

Example 2:  After Editing

It's probably unnecessary to mess with photo of noTTafarm because it's such a beautiful place!  But what do you think?  

Stay Tuned for More Artistic Adventures!

Window Dressing

To celebrate the one year anniversary of the new windows being installed in the 1920 portion of the house, I finally decided to stain them.  I know - you're probably asking, "what took you so long?"  The truth is that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it up to the standards set by a certain husband of mine.  I'm the kind of gal that says "it's good enough" rather than a "it needs to be perfect."  Since Scott was busy working on the bathroom this weekend, he agreed to let me give it a try.  

 Before:  pretty pine windows, waiting for stain.

 Tools of the Day:  rag, q-tips for the corners, and a dish of wipe-on stain.

The double-hung windows easily fold out for cleaning, so it was a pretty simple task to move them around to reach all of the sides.  Too bad I didn't decide to try this when the weather was cooler!

After:  one coat of stain complete on each of the 10 new windows.

We will most likely add another coat of stain to match the color of the original woodwork, then a coat or two of poly to seal in all the goodness.  

It felt good to be useful, and best of all, Scott gave me his approval!

Stay Tuned for Our Next Adventure!

Hurry Up and Wait

What do you think could top all the excitement of the dirt work occurring last week?  I wish I knew!

< < insert cricket sounds > >

For a variety of reasons, nothing has happened with the addition progress since Monday, June 25th.  The main hold-up right now is the need to move the power pole.  The power company must install the new underground electrical service and pad-mount transformer which will replace the existing pole-mounted transformer and overhead wires.  The foundation work can't really get started in the garage because there's a power pole in the middle of it.  One thing leads to another not getting done!

We have faith that things will soon be back on track and we'll have something to report - as soon as we get through this miserable heat/humidity wave and the July 4th holiday is over.

Stay Tuned!