Vision | 
05 30th, 2010| 
We have had ALOT of rain over the last week! This slowed us down on a few things, one of which is the pump installation on our well. It was too wet for our guy to get in with his crane to drop the pump down! So that is on hold for a bit. As is the septic system it has to dry up before he can get all the pipes in. We had a friend out with an excavator this week and that was great. We got a curtain drain/trench dug for around the septic/greywater area. We also pulled a fair number of dump trucks of material off the back of our land. Instead of paying to truck in materials we decided to use what we have here. We have some huge seams of sand as well as other great fill material. We have all the materials moved forward to where our road is going up to the building site. We had a dump truck here for a few hours but with the heavy rain we decided it would be better to have him back when the road wasn’t getting so mucky and rutted out!
Curtis was away at a film shoot for 5 days and when he was gone we had Gord working to keep us moving ahead on the foundation! The countdown is on until we are done foundation and ready for inspection,which is booked for Tuesday! We have the form work all done, fab form in and rebar about 3/4 done. Getting there!
Here are some pics up until a few days ago, still playing catch up 
And a few pictures of the kids walking the goats!
We had a farm birthday party for Sierra for her 8th birthday. We had chicken races, lollipop in the haystack and treasure hunts.. It was a beautiful sunny day! Hard to believe our little Sierra is already 8! Thanks to all our wonderful friends and family who came out to celebrate with us!
I am getting behind on updating on our foundation progress! This is where we were at about this time last week, I will get the current stuff up today too! Gord and Curtis worked away at getting the form work started for our fabform foundation. There were some areas on the East, North and West walls that required steeping since the rock surface was uneven with dips and valleys. We also rented a rebar cutter so that we could get our 10M and 15M rebar cut into pin lengths as well as the lengths that will lay in the concrete foundation. Curt also put in quite a few more solid days on material removal to get all the organic material off from where the home will sit. We are also going ahead with putting a septic system in, we were hoping to have our composting toilet and a greywater system but after many phone calls etc it sounds like the red tape is WAY too thick. Without a septic system it would be a long road before we were allowed to build.
We are having some road work done this week and then the septic will go in.
Here are some pics of the foundation forms going in…
We had Gord Baird from Eco Sense come up to help us out get going on our foundation.. He and Curtis got the batter boards in on the corners which would be used to hold the string lines to mark our exact home position. Curtis had spent quite a bit of time up until this point lining our place up with Polaris so we would get the most solar gain possible from our passive solar design. On that note we had a heat loss calculation done by a local engineer and we were quite happy with how the results came in, showing we would get over 30% of our heat from the sun alone.. We have a suspicion that our home will function better than that though! It was done based on Nanaimo’s weather and we live in a great sunny pocket where we are so our weather is better than there for sure!
Back to foundation.. We rented a rock drill for 3 days and Curt drilled 180 holes into the bedrock to pin our foundation as well as our frames to hold our fabric form. He felt pretty rattled after running it for a few days! We have the rebar here and will be staring cutting tomorrow. The rock is a kid free zone right now until we get the foundation poured, too many rebar spikes sticking out!
Curt is working on both the foundation and the computer making money so is super busy and working LONG hours!! We are so so lucky to have such a hardworking Dad/husband!! I am doing the phone calls, budgeting, material organizing and pick up, animal care and feeding the family. And keeping the kids happy and out of the way of the building site for now. Once we get to cobbing they will be able to be around the site more so I can put in more hours helping! So its all working out that way, we are happy working together as a family!
I had a meeting with the building inspector today and paid for our permit. He gave us the go ahead to work away on our foundation and he will take a look at it before we pour the concrete, as well as having the engineer approve it. So timing wise looks like if we can get the form work all done and ready to go we should be able to pour end of May which means our North infill wall and then cobbing will start early June!
Here are some pics of foundation work up till now..
