6.18.2015

Jim talked to the concrete contractor again this morning.  Tomorrow is out because of the iffy forecast.  So Wednesday looks like the next good day.  This is SO hard.  I told Jim that last year at this time we were waiting and waiting for our building permit.  This year it's concrete.  Both things totally out of our control.  We've been ready for so long now that it's become so very frustrating.  Fingers crossed for continued sunny forecast on Wednesday!

Today's forecast included rain so we weren't sure how much we would be able to get done.  Jim worked on the driveway to start the day...you can see here how the one driveway coming up the hill from the street turns into two driveways!

Before we could use the dirt from his driveway work for backfilling, we had a couple of jobs to work on.  First was extending the downspout and connecting it to what will eventually be another downspout in the corner.

Starting to glue the individual pieces together....

....and then gluing the entire system into the original downspout drain.

All finished!  This is more of that advance planning that is required now - can't decide later to have underground drains!

One of the next jobs we have to do is to work on the brick flashing.  The first part of that is a waterproof membrane.  We still had some Nudura membrane left so we wanted to try it out and see how it would stick to the block.  Jim had to unscrew the dimple board so that we could lap the new membrane over the old.

Using the roller to make sure it's all stuck down well.

We got this first area done.  Unfortunately, a lot of the block is still damp and needs to dry out so we couldn't proceed further on this job.

Time for more backfilling now!

Starting to fill up the hole.

Doing a little hand shoveling of finer dirt against the dimple board.  Of course, I was still scrambling down into the hole after each bucketful to pick out all the rocks that fell against the walls.

Getting close to the top!

We used up all the dirt we had - looks good!  This will help with any erosion from the rain.

Jim had more dirt piles at the bottom of the new driveway area so we used that dirt to work on backfilling around the septic system again.

Time for gravel around the pipe....

Then more dirt...

The pipe from the tank to the distribution box is now all covered up! 

Putting more gravel on the pipe going into the tank...

 

It started drizzling so we called it a day on the dirt.  Jim stayed and the raindrops stopped so he did some grass cutting and cleanup work.

 

High 72/Low 64