Complicated pin-pile footing forms abut regular old fashioned footing forms.

We’ve been a bit lazy about posting because it doesn’t really seem like anything is happening around here– though Morgan worked hard every day. Morgan slaved away on those footing forms for a month, finally feeling ready to call for inspection last Wednesday. He passed with flying colors, simultaneously passing two other inspections related to setbacks and erosion control. Whew!

Unfortunately, for one reason or another, we have to wait until this Wednesday to pour concrete into those meticulously prepared footing forms. He has a crew rallied for early Wednesday morning, though, and concrete will happen, at long last!

Moving our poor beleaguered rock back into the upright position.

Rock is now standing. Guaranteed that someone will smack it down again this winter, unless we get some concrete behind it.

In the meantime, our excavator parked his small machine on our property for us to use between jobs. We used it yesterday (with some moral support from our friend Jay) to prop up the magnificent rock we have down on the corner, which has been knocked over at least twice and maybe three times since we installed it there several years ago. We live on a curve at the end of a long hill, a place where people regularly lose control of their vehicles and have historically smashed into our fence. The rock is meant to prevent that, but because it is proudly up on end, it means that they stop, but they knock it over and ruin our landscaping around it. It has been a couple of years since we tried propping it up again because without a machine, it’s a matter of a truck and some straps and is a bit trickier. With a machine, no problem. We plan to dump a bit of concrete behind it when we have leftover, just to give it a little bit more of a chance.

Insulated Concrete Forms came out of buphalo’s yard and onto our rack in the driveway, awaiting their final purpose– foundation walls.

The other thing we did this week was move the ICF’s from buphalo’s property to ours (thanks Justin Rodda!). He will be so pleased. These big Lego-bricks of styrofoam will become the forms for our foundation walls, and then the insulation for our foundation walls. Pretty nifty! They should move off the rack gradually next week after the footings cure and our walls can begin to take shape. Once we have concrete foundation walls, we can set the house back down. Looking forward to it.