CMR Update August 22: The House has Landed

Look kids, no hands - I mean no beams!! In the middle of last week I got an exciting text from GC Paul that just said, "The house has landed." So I scurried over there later in the day and WOW! All the beams thrust through the house had been magically taken away and...well our CMR is sitting on it's own brandy-new foundation. Cool beans!

All the exterior pits of despair have now been filled in and we didn't catch one errant nosey kid. Disappointing. But, they're filled up with water-proofing, gravel, PVC drainage pipes and nice clean fill dirt. GC Paul says we should be as dry as a dessert down there in the new lower level. I guess we need a nice big rain storm to see the proof in that particular pudding. But it looks good, even without a front porch.

The crew is now rocking on the interior framing and we got some new walls this week. And, although I forgot to take a photo of it specifically, we got a part of a moment frame. If you look to the left side of the photo you can see a piece of steel amongst all the wood. That, my friends is $10k worth of steel. Pretty unassuming. For that price I want it to sing old Steel Songs from the mill days and do my yard work.

George the Elder and Henry stand in the new doorway to the laundry room.

A view from Henry's room in to the rumpus room where George the Younger basks in the sun gazing at the pool room.

View from George the Youngers room to the now nearly complete framing of the west wall of the pool room.

This is a big pit that is in the rumpus room adjacent to the pool room wall. I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this large void is, but I suspect it has something to do with waterproofing of the lowest point of the excavation. We had a little trouble trying to get the floor level and the drain level working together. There was a few days were the words "sump pump" were mentioned to our unabashed horror. Thanks to some creative work by soils engineers, GC Paul and some other guys, we no longer need a sump pump. I really do still love our team.

And our final photo today is a view of the two George's attacking the holly tree in the front yard. Got a letter earlier in the week from our draconian HOA about how our holly tree was encroaching the sidewalk and needed to be trimmed back. My first response was to write a pithy note back saying two things - 1) that holly tree would encroach ONLY the forward progress of Andre the Giant and 2) I will trim my holly tree the very moment that they came and dealt with our section of parkway (the landscaping between the sidewalk and the street that belongs to the HOA) so that it didn't look like the median strip somewhere on a deserted highway. I reconsidered this and just trimmed the tree. I have sneaking suspicion that this is not the time to use up and chits or good will with the HOA. I got more more approvals in my future and need them as "friends".