6.22.2014 - First scoops for footers!

Why is it that smoke detector batteries never die on a random Tuesday afternoon but wait until 4:00 in the morning to start beeping like crazy?  That's the way our morning started.  After taking the batteries out of both detectors (because you can never tell where the beeping is coming from) and going back to bed, the beeping started again.  It ended up being the CO2 detector.  Not much sleep to be had after that.

 

When Jim got to the land, he first spent some time moving concrete forms from up at the top of the property down into the carriage house building site.  We're going to be needing those soon!

 

 

Then we started measuring and completing the final layout markings for the carriage house that we will use to beginning digging the footers.

 

 

This is a view from the top of the hole looking down.  If you look closely, you can see all of our orange markings laying out the footprint as well as all the marks where Jim needs to dig for the footers.

Then we got the laser level out to set our elevations for the footings.  This is a crucial step since the footings are going to be stepped to different elevations because parts of the foundation will include a frost wall and parts won't.  I don't know how Jim figures this out - it was confusing just thinking about it!  He has the area really flat but it's obviously not perfect so he has to figure those differences in when he's calculating how deep the footers need to be.

Here's the first scoop of dirt for the footers!

Making good progress down the side...

Jim kept stopping to dig periodically and check depth and elevation.  I ended up holding the stick for the most part so he could stay in the excavator.

Great progress for the first day of digging footers!