ADVENTURES OF THE CANADIAN FAMILY ROBINSON

I haven’t been on here much lately to update! Life has been a little busy
So here is a quick update..
The well is all hooked up now that the ground dried enough to get the crane in there and waterlines are run up to the house to the pressure tank etc. We went with a really good Grundfos pump system for our 400 foot + well and have 9gpm of clean fresh water pumping out now! We have the ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) in and inspected and will be poured tomorrow afternoon. It took us a bit longer than planned to get them up due to a few issues and also Curt spent about a week back on the computer working. Next step will be to backfill the foundation, we will be using our bobcat to do that, we have about 10 dumptrucks of material needed to fill in the foundation, glad we were able to pull some clean fill off the back of our farm! After backfilling floor will be finished up to the point of insulation..The interior framed North wall sits on our finished floor so we need to get it up to that point and level. Then we have a friend coming over to frame our North wall with us on the weekend. North wall will be a light clay-woodchip giving us a high insulation value a great addition to our passive solar design! The infill will take a while to dry so will be the first to go up. Cob will begin right after that. We have had lots of media interest on our project which is great! Also to our friends and family wanting to help out, We appreciate you all! And to those of you who warned us 75% of people who live in a small space or try to build a house together get a divorce, you are SO WRONG, we have lived in our 5th wheel for 2 years in August and we are way happier than we were in a big house with a big mortgage.
Garden is growing well, canning season will be busy! We have fresh kale, lettuce, spinach, baby potatoes, radish, cilantro, parsley, beets and peas coming off daily. Tomatoes in the greenhouse are doing great, with our 20 tomato plants we should have alot to can, make sauce, freeze, sun-dry etc . The kids have been working on their secret forts and fairy village daily, they are all doing well and loving farm life!

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We got the go ahead to pour yesterday after inspection from our engineer and building inspector.. The weather here has been horrible, unbelievable amounts of rain coming down!! Today the weather cleared up during the pour to a very light drizzle and by the early afternoon the sun and wind was out! Hope it sticks around for a bit! For our concrete we went with a local company here and our mix is 25% flyash..
The pumper truck arrived and unfortunatley they sent the wrong size truck, the boom did not quite reach with the shorter hose on the end, so they had to put on the 25 foot hose that is HEAVY when full of concrete. Gord and Curt ran the hose and Ian and I (for some of it) did the tamping. We thought we may be just short on concrete part way through the pour but we had enough! It was gut wrenching watching the forms and fabric form flex under the weight of the concrete but it all held just beautiful! The North wall corners had some fairly deep sections! We will start taking the forms off in the next few days and have some QuadLock ICFs going in on the stepped sections of the North, East and West walls. These should go up fairly fast and they will be inspected before we pour them..
Thanks again Gord for all his hard work, sticking it out camping in the rain and always great conversations!!
Thanks Ian for the help and support, we appreciate it!
and thanks Curt for your amazing ability to balance being a Dad, husband, money maker and home-builder, we LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!

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Every family has one they say..

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We had our first inspection and it all went well! We had our engineer here from Manitoba Kris Dick, he was out to check our ours as well as a few other homes going up, he is wonderful and such an amazing talented person to be working with! We also had a colleague of Kris’ here who will be doing our inspections that he can’t make it to. We also had our local chief building inspector from our district that we are working with, and Gord here too. They checked out our rebar and cable ties and we happy with how it looked, we were given the go ahead to pour Wed am!

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