Now we have a hole in the yard . . . The next step was the footings. This wasn’t too bad. We bought a laser level (self leveling) and feel it paid for itself in getting the footing forms leveled. It’s much easier when it comes to everything else if the bottom is correct.

Anyway, Hubby had a good start, and when I came home from work I helped with the ground work, and the next day he had the forms ready to go.

Called the concrete company, and they were able to come right out. Nice thing about doing this in March, most people have not started their projects yet, so there isn’t much of a wait to get concrete or rock hauled. Hubby and son worked on getting the cement finished, and when I came home it was all done (I like it when that happens!).

Son took these pictures, I really was a work LOL!

The insulation is covering up the exposed waterlines. Our plans included them coming up the floor in the new basement, but for now we had to run them into the existing cellar so they could be attached to the existing lines. We didn't hook up the new water trough for the horses until November, so set up a tank with a heater element in it for now.

We made plans to have the foundation poured the next Monday, and I arranged to take that day off.

When we were planning this project, we decided to go with poured foundation walls. Weren’t certain how we were going to do this, and then we discovered the insulated foam forms. Boy, those sure are neat to use, but they aren’t cheap! We ordered them and had them on site before we had the hole dug, so that wasn’t a concern. We did a lot of research and figured we sort of knew what we were doing. Lots of people use these out here. Our biggest problem was we didn’t allow for enough time to get them set up.

We arranged for the concrete and pump truck to be out around 10:30 Monday morning, and started work Friday afternoon. First was mostly clean-up and figuring things out, and on Saturday the wind picked up. Didn’t want to be dealing with the forms in the wind, so we figured it would be ok to wait until Sunday – it shouldn’t take all that much time to set up walls 12’ x 22’, 7’ high (WRONG!!!!). Ok, we did have a lot of the preliminary work done, had the braces ready to go and stuff like that.

Got busy Sunday morning and things looked good, by late Sunday afternoon we had about 4’ up, and it wasn’t looking so good anymore. Sun went pretty early that time of year, so pretty soon we had the lantern out. We’ve done quite a bit of building by lantern light. Remind me to tell you about the time my husband dropped a 14’ 4x6 on my head . . . But that was another building in another state LOL!!! We do a lot of stuff by guess and by gosh, just in case someone reading this might think we actually know what we are doing . . .

My son works nights, and has Sunday night off, so he got up around 5 pm and started helping. Around Midnight we got our second wind, and it looked like we might actually get some sleep that night. I gave up around 4 am, and lay down for an hour. Around 5:30, hubby and son came in for a break. Hubby got about 2 hours of sleep, and then we were back out there getting ready for the cement. The forms looked good, everything was braced good and solid, and Hubby was vacuuming out the debris that had fallen in the forms. He had a pvc pipe taped to the end of the shop vac, and only dropped the vac off the scaffolding a couple of times!

He was just finishing up when the pump truck showed up. Hubby handled the shoot, and away they went.

We shut the power off to be safe, and they went up in about 2’ lifts at a time. One cement truck got us about half way up, then we took a break while we waited for the second load. Going around the first lift with the second load and we had our first blowout. Now we’d made the little clamp things that the manufacturer recommended, but they weren’t going to work in this case. Grabbed a sheet of plywood, turned the power back on and cut it in half, then screwed it to the forms over the break. Almost forgot to do both the inside where the break was, and the outside since there was no support with the inside form gone. That was the only break, and we got the rest done without much trouble. I worked inside getting the cement that had poured out the hole spread around so it wouldn’t cause us grief when we did the floor, and hubby put in the anchors and smoothed the surface. It was a LONNGGG two days, but we had walls!

¶ 7:52 PM