For whatever reason, Thursday was the day the slow process of piecemeal excavation became a huge rush of pile-driving accomplishment. We were hoping to start a four-day weekend that day, but frankly, making progress on the house is way more important to us right now.

Morgan and I got up at 5:30am to start prepping– well, he was prepping, and I just couldn’t sleep with the excitement of the day upon us. A lot had to get done before the geotechnical engineer showed up to monitor pin-pile installation.

Pin-piles will support our new foundation footings in the places where the geotech had previously determined the ground was a bit too soft. He was on-site to test the ground in precise locations, to determine how many piles and where they were needed, and to affirm that they were correctly installed.

It was a long but very satisfying day!

We are now back on Morgan’s schedule instead of an outside contractor’s. Today and tomorrow he is installing new floor joists with Buphalo and Flaster, and we will hopefully be able to move the house over (now about 4′ instead of 5′) later this week.

We have not had our excavation contractor’s full attention. He is juggling other jobs and coming through just enough to feel like things are moving, but not fast. It’s hard for me to tell how much longer this phase will last, but he was at our place bright and early this morning, so maybe that’s a good sign.

We had our “pre-construction” inspection yesterday, the last hurdle in the permit process that we were nervous about. Technically, we haven’t “built” anything yet, but still, a lot of work has obviously happened here. Apparently, the inspector didn’t bat an eye. Morgan did spend the morning unhooking our pipes and water lines so that the fact that we are living in this raised-up house wasn’t demanding attention. No need to make things difficult :). 

At this point all lights are green and we are ready to go. Our excavation contractor has been digging away our foundation and the old slab, re-grading and prepping the land. 

One of my clients today said, “Now that you have your permit, the next big thing is to be done, right?” He has a point! But I think I will celebrate each small achievement along the way– when the excavation is done, we move the house over five feet to the south, and that will seem like something to celebrate, too! 

In the meantime, the earth moves, and we are digging it.

We have been living in a suspended state for a week. Waiting… For permits… For our excavation contractor…
The house wobble is less disturbing now, though I find myself expecting other buildings to shimmy gently once I stop moving.
We are still carrying our kitchen sink water out in bins to dump on plants in the yard. It’s a little bit of rigmarole that just makes me feel grateful that water magically comes into my home, and most of the time, magically leaves it, too. Plumbing is great.
Morgan hooked up the washer and dryer out in the yard, under a pop-up tent by the shop. Another luxury I do not take for granted.
Morgan is ready to step away from the computer and get his hands dirty again. I’m ready for that to happen, too. I have a good feeling that things will start moving again soon, and so I will take a deep breath in this pause and try to enjoy the novelty of the weird view, the wobble and sway, and walking the plank to my front door.

We weren’t sure it was going to happen today, but Morgan got up at 6am to start sawing the house off the foundation. Nothing more reassuring than having your house sawed off the foundation!

As it turns out they did show up, and up it went, 42″. I have a few shots here, but since I was at work all day, I missed the action. We will have a time-lapse video of it to post eventually.

We are mostly hooked back up– power and water are on, and the bathroom drains work. The kitchen drain is now blocked by one of the cribs that are supporting the house, so we will have to work with a bucket there. Creative solutions may appear, but for now it’s a bit messy.

We are still waiting for the permit. Technically, we have not built anything yet, so we are still ok. We really need that permit this week. Please, please, permit, please come this week! We’ve been reassured that things are lining up for us, but I will feel SO MUCH BETTER when we have that sucker in hand.

The house has a disconcerting wobble when someone walks through it now. I don’t really notice it when I’m walking, but if I’m being still and someone else walks through it is a little nauseating– not because it worries me, but because I have issues with motion sickness. I wish motion sickness was something I could “work on”, because this would be an excellent opportunity for that.

Stay tuned for time lapse coverage… Excavation begins in three days!

Today is supposed to be the big day… but we decided to push it one more week out, to give the permits a little more time to clear. Once we lift this thing, its GO! GO! GO!, so we’d really like to be legal if at all possible. The DPD has our plans and has been checking off items, but the last one is pending.

Here’s hoping they finish it up this week!

Years ago, as an experiment, we bought a bunch of feeder fish from Liam’s in Chinatown and distributed them among our rain barrels. The idea was that they would eat any mosquito larvae and maybe fertilize the water a bit. A lot of them died almost immediately, but some of the ones in the rain barrels that were in the shade survived. They have lived for at least five years in those barrels, with sporadic feeding, through all kinds of weather, and we respect them for that.
We have to move the rain barrels to do this house-lift, so it was my job yesterday to empty them by watering our unseasonably dry garden. I got to near the bottom of one with a fish in it and went to check on it so we could try to pull it out before it was drained, and as I was tilting the barrel to get a better look, a heavy garden tool slid off the top of the barrel and clunked inside with a loud thump, and it seemed to me like it had clobbered the poor fish.
I was distraught! After all this time, to be crushed so quickly and unjustly by a random tool! I was hollering and wailing, and Morgan came quickly to see what had happened. He was equally dismayed.
I ran to get a net, and he fished out the little orange body, which was–miraculously!– still alive. We quickly plopped him in the other shaded barrel with the two fish already in residence, and he began swimming around seemingly unharmed.

I have been forbidden to empty this barrel, which is fine with me. We don’t know what to do with these guys now, we feel responsible for them. We don’t have any perfect shade to put them in away from the house… But we’ll figure something out.

We lost the front porch today. We did appreciate it while we had it, though– ate dinner out there, had some beverages, sat and rested. It was good.
Now we enter the weird phase of sketchy entry on a ramp. It will be even more sketchy in a couple of weeks when we go five feet up.

Morgan has some great photos in this Flickr set.

There is an image of me in 1999 building the brick walkway at a work party before we were dating, and then another of me taking that walkway up just a few weeks ago. Who would have known?