Sunday, July 22, 2007

What's happened in the last month or so??

Sorry for the delayed update, but things have been happening up here at a pretty good clip.

After getting the excavation completed, we brought in a drainage expert to help lay out french drains where the foundation will be. This will prevent water from collecting under the slab.

In addition, we laid in a french drain along side the road to keep water from running down the slope and washing out the road.
Here you can see the entire house's footing walls laid out. The footings took a few days to stack, and then they were poured on a Thursday. By that evening, the concrete was hardened, and 3 days later it was completely cured.

Here is a view of the garage, looking East. The room past the garage will be a bathroom and guest bedroom.



Here is another view, this time looking West, of the entire structure's footings. You can see from this vantage that there is a downward slope to the left of the picture (South-West).





Believe it or not, those are all the pieces needed for the entire exterior of our house!


You can see here that a large load of ARXX was dropped off.


Here is the label on each pallet of ARXX. That is the brand of Insulating Concrete Forms (ICFs) that we are using for our exterior wall construction. We chose ICFs for their energy efficiency, and they go really well with geothermal heat pumps and radiant floor heat, which we are using.






Here is a view looking from the North at the garage. You can see the ARXX in the house, where the contractors are getting ready to stack it.






This is a picture looking down along a wall of the ARXX ICF wall. You can see the plastic "webs" that hold the rebard in place and also give you something to screw into like "studs".



Here is a view of the wall-stacking that has been completed thus far from the South of the property.