Framed

Carter made an appearance, enjoying some G& Ts on the loveliest days we'd had in a week.

And we had the addition framed up. Our plan for the weekend, is to get this side of the existing house stripped and put in the new windows. A big challenge for us, but a good goal for the long weekend. I'll need to have it stripped in order to get the shingles to the dump on Saturday, since we don't have a dumpster this time, which is kind of a pain in the can.

Foundation

Well, soon after the guys were finished excavating the hole for the addition... (Oh, did I mention we are adding a mudroom entry between the original house and the kitchen. This will house a mudroom, entry, a coat closet, a powder room, and a little linen closet. ) the guys ran off (they had to catch a ferry to their next job!), leaving a giant hole. Fred Prescott, the foundation guy, came in and built the forms for the footings.

And his son took it from here, this was to be his last foundation he poured with his dad before he was moving to Massachusetts to go to college.

Footings being poured.

Moving the wet concrete around doesn't look easy.

He smooths it out with a trowel.

The next day, in between torrential rain, they put up the wall forms.

Bartlett is thrilled to have a new dirty place to lay.

Septic 101- part 2

Part 2; Septic install.

As you can see from the photo above- this is the leaching bed. What happens is this- PVC piping is hooked into the concrete pre-cast tank and run on top of the black beds which are made out of a geotech fabric and some plastic thing that looks like an egg crate. Inside the tank bacteria eats away at the waste and pees out a cleanish waste and that gray water is carried through the pipes on the leaching bed and is distributed into the ground, which again gets cleaned through the leaching bed system.
Chappy is putting the bed to sleep with a sheet of fabric over the top of the leaching beds.

Then he buries it with another foot of sand.

The excavation for the addition. Ba BYE brick steps. Oh and I forgot to tell you, when they wrecked the front steps to put the connection into the tank- it was a slab of concrete that was reinforced with what looked like an old spring bed frame. The kind that my grandma had on the porch and was super squeaky.
That guy with the shovel just realized there was a huge tree stump/root ball and he is trying to uncover the edges of it....hee hee hee! And that other guy is Chappy the excavator operator and he is not laughing.

The front now has a layer of loam on top of where the septic was installed. It will be great if grass grows.

Large tree stump/root ball. This one came up easy, about 2 hours? The driveway got a bit smaller as the pressure from the machine cracked the driveway further back, yikes.

There it is. In it's glory.

That is the 2nd root. It wasn't as easy, and there were some not so nice words expressed about it.

Septic 101

It's here! Our septic is being installed, today. It was a bit of a surprise this morning when the trucks showed up. I wasn't expecting them. But there they were at 7am. It'll be a mess out front, for a bit but we'll finally have a septic and we won't be wondering how much longer we could go without it.

These loops are what the liquid waste is run through- or the leaching field.

Looking for the existing cesspool. Surprise! There isn't one or at least there isn't one any longer. It may have collapsed. At least the pond will finally have a chance to clean up.

Close call with the crane and the electrical wires, this guy wasn't even sweating.

The concrete blocks are the bottom and top of the tank.

Lifting into the hole. Just made it under the wire, literally.

Oops, the tank is in the right spot, but needs to be 4" further down and then we won't need a pump. They pull it up and dig a bit more out and set it in the hole again.

Lid on- over a water stop sealant. They are ready to lay the leaching field out. Waiting for a layer of sand, silt, dust to be unloaded in order to lay the leaching bed out.