Batter Boards and Cute Helpers

Building the Batter Boards

    Batter boards are temporary wooden frameworks used to suspend the layout strings for a foundation. Once they are built, the batter boards resemble hurdles.
Their placement is crucial to building a foundation exactly as the plans specify, and certain elements of their construction must be exact.

The batter boards are used throughout construction as a reference for the foundation. So after building these, we weren't too happy to find them in the basement, along with the picnic table and some extra lumber...thanks to a mischief night prank.

So after putting them back together and back where they belong, we got the final approval from the man in charge.

During this process, we've had many little helpers come to assist us.

 

 

.

     

Breaking Ground

October 28, 2017

BREAKING GROUND!!!

    Today was the day we finally broke ground. Around 8am the ecavator showed up on the back of a trailer. The driver took one look at the property and decided that he was not driving up on to it. He said the trailer was going to get stuck. We told him we had machines here before and never had a problem, but he didn't want to take a chance, so he left...with the excavator. Luckily we called another company and they were able to bring a machine right out, and they had no problem at all driving onto the property.
     Dans brother Mark ran the excavator. Dan and Daniel were on the ground directing him as to where to dig and how deep.

They moved about 1000 yards of dirt over 2 days.

By the end of the weekend, the basement was pretty much dug.

Not to mention the amazing piles of dirt for the kids to play on.

After digging to the depth that was specified by the engineer, we hit water.

The next day when we got there, we saw a lot of water.

We weren't sure if we hit the water table or not, so we dug some test holes to find out. Sure enough, we hit the water table.  And this began a month long delay for us. We started by buying pumps to get rid of the water. We pumped everything to the side of the property. We dug a trench to get rid of some water, but that didn't work. We got a generator and some battery operated sump pumps that would turn on when the water reached a certain level. The first one broke, so we got another one. That one worked. We had to go over a few times a day to check on the pumps, and make sure the generator didn't get stolen. 

The goal was to get above the water table, so the next step was to get stone.

So we ordered almost 100 ton, and using the skid steer we started to spread it around, filling in the deepest sections of water.  

One of the most amazing things during this ordeal was the amount of mud that we were working in. There were areas that we had to avoid because we would sink down to our knees and it was very difficult to get out. The kids were muddy,  the cars were muddy. We even brought mud home with us. This is what the tub looked like after Joseph took a bath:

This entire ordeal set us back about a month and almost $10,000....all because of a mis-calculation on the part of the engineer.