Looks Like a Mess Out Here
Wednesday, April 30
It was a quiet weekend at the studio construction site as the crew from A-1 Builders works four 10-hour days Tuesday through Friday. The weather was good, which allowed the saturated soil to dry out a bit. The excavators dug trenches along the foundation walls to lay perforated drainage pipe. They’ve also painted a waterproofing compound on the foundation walls. This is an extra step to keep the underpinnings of the studio dry when the building is sealed up tight. For now, we’ve got piles of dirt everywhere and quite a mess. But our chickens have been having a great time picking through the dirt for fresh worms and grubs.
This is the ditch beside the stairs to my office. You can’t really see it in the photo, but we could watch water draining out of the soil into the ditch. It flowed out from the boundary between the topsoil and a layer of clay. We’ve got about a foot of good-looking topsoil, a good thing for our garden. This area has been seriously soggy every time it rains, so it will be great to have good drainage here. Ultimately there will be a path leading from the sidewalk around the stairs to the camera room outside entrance.
In order to get into the studio right now you have to jump the ditch. Should we keep the moat? I think not. When we’re finished there’s going to be a patio in front of French doors here. That white pipe is the sewer line which heads uphill to our septic system. We learned today we have to replace the grinder pump. The new one will go in the ground under the crawl space, with an access hatch in the closet above.
Here’s the pony wall and some of the joists that will support the floor under the new reception and sales area. The photo was taken at the beginning of the work day on Wednesday and shows what was accomplished on Tuesday.
The second pony wall sits under the middle of the camera room. Here one of the carpenters finishes nailing the short studs to the sill plate. The pony walls are being built from ground-contact treated lumber. They’ve built access holes into the walls to facilitate getting into all three sections of the crawl space. By the end of the week all this should be covered with the plywood subfloor.
Doesn’t look like a mess at all! ☺ It looks like heaven! Thanks for sharing your progress while we get to dream big, TOO.