Rain Delay -- Thanks A Lot El Nino!

The rain delay has been with both the main house and the blog. It has been just too depressing to post during these last two dreary weeks, but I decided that if I wait until the rain to stop, you may not see a post until April.

Just after my last post, the foundation crew came in and finished the back yard demo.


Both cages, the rest of the garage and the picnic table have all gone from our back yard to big piles of junk in the front yard, as you can see from the picture below.



They also brought a truck in to remove 40 yards of dirt, thus turning Mount Katz (an excellent photo spot for the casita) into the Katz swamp, complete with extreme puddles and lots of very wet mud.

During our few breaks in the weather, they did excavate for the foundation for the house and the patio. They had to cut a hole in the floor of the house to get down in there and dig for an additional piece of the foundation that will help support the posts and beams of the addition. It looked like really painful work to stand down in the crawl space and dig up the dirt and then lift it up through the hole.

This picture shows where the new wall will be -- it doesn't look like we are adding that much space, does it?


This picture shows the entire foundation excavation, including the patio, as seen from the house. The patio looks big, but I'm sure we'll wish we had more space.


Also, in the interests of destroying absolutely all of Jake's landscaping and irrigation systems, when jackhammering out the front step and excavating for the footings for the new porch, they cut the main irrigation pipe that runs across the front of the yard. There is no question that we are going to need to do major work on both the front and back yard landscapes when all this is finished! You can see the excavation in the front below.


As of today, the foundation crew has built the forms for the foundation, but with all the rain this week it is doubtful as to when they will do the actual pour. We'll let you know!