pouring the walls

Here goes the concrete and as you can see, we were quite helpful. I don't know about the guy standing behind the truck; he just stood there and pushed a button once in awhile. The pump was exciting. It would lurch and everyone holding on would get pulled along.

As the concrete filled the walls we all took turns looking inside to see them fill with concrete. The best part was when Sean realised he hadn't put in the gray water pipe for the basement plumbing and had to cut a piece of pipe and a hole in the form before the concrete made it to the end of the form.

forms are ready

the forms are ready to pour, and you can see
inside and outside.

end of the laundry

There was an inexplicable delay for the concrete so the crew began demolition of the laundry room as soon as my walking buddy finished moving the electrical. I hate those jack hammers. They're bloody loud.

I had been wondering why Victor was the only one putting the tools away one night, so the next morning I went to look in the box after he brought the tools down.

Pour

Today I got to watch as they poured and poured concrete footings into the new foundation for our garage. Pretty cool the concrete comes out of a big 4" flexible pipe which gets very heavy when the concrete is flowing out of it. And then there is this other metal rod which is officially called the concrete vibrator and it makes the concrete all level out and it also takes the bubbles out. Then they went and smoothed it all out. It looks good. Then I warmed up pizza for the crew but most of them had already gone home, so now Sean & I are eating the pizza. A good day all-in-all. Photo Credits: the guy pouring in front is Victor, with Pedro helping/ standing behind. The hands in the bottom photo are Armando's.

Passed

So OK, this does not look like much. But the thing is that this is a photo of the final product - our new water service coming into the house. And in addition this is the first item that Sean & I have been responsible for that was inspected by the city. Good news is we passed with flying colors. Phew.

Sweating copper

What the heck is going on here? Metal is smoking, I'm holding a blow-torch - can this possibly be good? Well truth is that Sean was good enough to teach me how to solder a joint for plumbing- also known as sweating copper. Sweating copper sounds pretty cool, I know & It's actually kinda fun too, except that one of the joints I soldered popped off

later when water pressure was applied - whoops. Lucky for me Sean kinda laughed and then fixed it right up.
We've decided that we will be our own plumbers on the house - which means you can probably look forward to more pictures of us with smoking pipes in the future.

Poop-hole

Yesterday was a long day. Most of it was good but there was much going on and not all of it can go well. In the case of this photo here you are lucky, dear viewer, that the smell does not travel with the image- if it did you would most certainly be leaving this page. This here would be a genuine poop-hole. I don't want to get too into the gory details, but basically our sewer line was at least in parts as old as our home- 100 this year. So it crumbled and was not draining correctly- which is surprisingly common and only became an imminent problem for us when the digging for the new garage began, because the run-off from our sewer was filtering into the the job site. Not so good. So these fine professional exterior plumbers came with a fairly amazing machine in which they burst the existing sewer pipe and then drag a new plastic sewer line behind it. This is called trench-less sewer, and for the most part it worked out well for us. Although they do not have to dig all along the line, they did have to dig this one big hole, right next to the main (city) sewer line, in the road. The sewer is about 10 feet down, so it was a nice deep hole, and when they managed to connect their hole to our sewer line, well, see that greenish liquid down at the bottom down there? Believe you me everyone around got to know more about our sewer line then they'd ever hoped to.
All's well that ends well- & our new line is guaranteed for 200 years...

Under the top soil

It may seem like all the talk is about the garage right now but that would be because the garage is where all the action is. Shown here is the back corner of our garage to be- with amazing colors and shapes from different soils. Pretty wild. The retaining wall to hold the soil back will be around 6 feet high. They used an excavator to get most of the soil out, which is what left those lines in the wall.

Almuerzo

Here is some of the fine crew taking their lunch break. Clearly the best seat in the house is on the excavator.

A light in the attic

There has been far too much writing without a picture of Zaya. Here she would be, in her pajamas, with Sean, up in the little attic that came with the house.

How does one get up into this attic? Well as you can see from the picture below, you climb up the hole in the ceiling of Zaya's closet- or in this case you kinda wiggle your way down.

Alas, the attic will soon be no more. When the addition goes on, the attic is getting pulled off and the 2nd story is replacing it. Leaving us only memories...