Foundation waterproofing

Turns out waterproofing was one of those tasks that was WAY cheaper to do ourselves - just dirty and stinky! Here's Matt "painting" on the thick sticky primer. 

After some rain, it was pretty mucky down in the hole, so we put the kids (and me and Matt) to work shoveling enough dirt down into the gap by the footings for us to be able to walk down there for the next step! The wet clay can get pretty mucky...
 

Rolling on the crazy sticky sheet-good waterproofing membrane with Matt brought back all sorts of memories of the 2013 addition...

And that's followed by the pink rigid insulation, and you can see Rinnah working on backfilling little by little with Eben's mini wheelbarrow.

And Gloria and Ebenezer are packing down the fill, making sure the rigid stays in place!

The rest of the foundation walls

By the end of the next week, all the rest of the foundation walls were built up. Notice how they're higher in the back of the garage than at the front, as the level of the dirt is going to come part way up the walls, both to give us a place to dispose of dirt (we hate to pay to either get or get rid of dirt!) and also to visually bring down the height of the garage from the back and side yards.

This is my favorite detail on the block walls - all these different width blocks all lining up perfectly with their little offsets so the walls on top will sit *right* where they're supposed to be!

 

Garage...

 It's happening!

Footings are poured, and foundation walls are getting built up, starting here with the crawl space under the finished entry. Notice that our main door in and out of the house is not super useful right now!

And the old one's gone!

 The morning after the big take-down, this is where we were:

And when the kids and I got back from a morning outing, the old slab was gone! So obviously, the kids got out their shovels! The rest of the day was spent digging random holes. :)

And next week, the excavation of the new footings was completed...

...leaving us with a big, fun pile of dirt to climb on!

The big day - August 8

 So, Wednesday night at church Matt was talking with some friends about the accelerated schedule of the concrete, and they offered their 12 year old son, K, to come help for a few hours. Were we ever glad to have him!

Here we are at the beginning of the day. Matt and I had gotten all of the shingles, sheathing, and 2x4 rafters of the roof apart and down onto the ground. This was about 10am. I love how there's such a draw to be up on that roof! My neice, G, Evania, Ebenezer, Gloria, even Owen and his buddy, Breck are up there! 

An hour later, work is progressing on taking the 1x board sheathing off the side walls of the garage. Please note, too, how the garage is STILL FULL OF STUFF!! Well, maybe not quite full, but certainly not empty!

Here's Owen hauling some of his stuff out of the garage. K is helping, as that green box is HEAVY - full of old tools that belonged to Owen's great-grandfather

Sheathing on the back of the garage is continuing to progress...

Interesting discovery at the back, and part of why it's neat living on property that has a family history...notice anything about that particular 2x4 stud? Yup. Some serious scorching on there. Matt says he remembers his dad talking about an outbuilding that burned down when he was pretty young - bet this one was deemed good enough to go into the new garage.

Time to start taking up the last of the attic floor boards.

And obviously that starts making things just a little rickety, so Matt sent K down and finished the last few by himself. It's about 3pm at this point.

Meanwhile, down below, the last few bits of wall sheathing are coming down. You can see K, G, and Leah racing to get their small segment done. K won. By a long shot.

Ebenezer is hard at work here pulling nails.

It's now 7pm. As you'll notice, it's not QUITE ready for excavation equipment to show up in the morning! K has gone home, but the rest of us are working away....

Pulling nails...stacking lumber...

Reuben's coming out to check on the progress...

Another friend from church came over to help. Usually he and Matt get together on Thursdays for Bible study, but Matt didn't have time to stop working, so S just came to help!

Leah stopped to hold a chicken. :)

And, finally, at 9:45pm. It's ready! We did it! What a day!

Garage from the beginning

Back to the beginning...to save costs and have the chance to re-use some of the perfectly good lumber from the old garage (some of which has sentimental value), we decided to disassemble the old garage ourselves instead of paying someone to demolish it and haul it away. You've got to start somewhere, and Matt started here in late July with pulling off the soffit of the large overhang. There's an interesting use of sub-flooring under there!

Next came pulling off the sheetrock, revealing some fun drawings underneath that were probably done by Matt's dad as a middle schooler.

We were grateful for help from a young man at church to do some of this dirty work with Matt.

And then this is where it started to really get interesting! This is August 2. It looks pretty much like it always has.

This is five days later: August 7th. The roof framing is just a skeleton.

There's what used to be the garage filling up the huge dump trailer.

2x4 rafters coming down one by one. (Crazy that it was built with 2x4s for the rafters!!!)

And top half is just about gone! This was the end of the day for Wednesday, August 7th. That's when we got the call from the excavator saying another project got wrapped up early, and they'd be ready to start breaking up the slab and digging for the footings on Friday instead of Monday. Uhhhh. :) Okay! Needless to say, Thursday, August 8th will need an entire post of its own!