It has been a while since the last project progress report. I didn’t really want to have 6 weeks of ‘continuing to dig under the house’ blog posts. And there wasn’t anything fun to look at, just holes in the ground.

But on Friday, 21 April 2006, Jeff Keogh, the building inspector in Carpinteria came by for an inspection of the pads we had dug. He was really impressed with the work we had done. We have permission to pour concrete under the house.

We will be gone on vacation in Palm Springs next weekend, so the pour will occur on Saturday, 6 May 2006.

Woo hoo!

We took a break from digging this past weekend to re-assemble my garage. We had moved so much stuff around to put in the new doors that it was a disaster. So we rebuilt some shelves, re-arranged some stuff in the rafters and re-modeled a cabinet (made the switch from tall to wide).

At the end of the day on Saturday, we had both cars in the garage. I don’t know how long it will last, but it is nice to be parking in the garage again.

The garage doors are finally installed. 2 installers were over during the rain on Saturday, 11 March 2006. (So much for guaranteed 10 day install!). It took them about 4 hours to install the 2 doors.
Meanwhile,
we worked under the house. And
Lucy ate some hotdogs with ketchup for lunch.

We worked under the house this weekend, digging 4 of the 14 1-foot deep holes for the cement pads that will interiorly support the second floor. These 4 will support the stairs so they overlapped quite a bit. The final space ended up being 6’x7′. When last we were digging under the house, we learned that it was extremely difficult work to remove the dirt from under the house through the single access point on the West side (even though we had significantly enlarged the opening. We were piling the dirt on tarps and dragging the dirt half the width of the house before removing it.
So we took some time to cut 2 new access points in the existing foundation. This was tough jackhammer work, but Dad brought over his newest toy, a recently acquired Makita 1 1/2″ rotary hammer. While this didn’t make cutting the concrete out easy,
it made it easier. We had to move a big camillia bush from the back yard
where we wanted to access point. In the previous post, there was a picture with Max
standing in the raised planter. That is where the camillia bush was transplanted.
As usual, Lucy slept through all of the banging, including the 5 or so times I hit
my head on the floor joists in the 18″ crawlspace we were working in. But on Friday,
about 4 pm, Toby asked us that we take a break from jackhammering to allow Lucy to
fall asleep in the room above where we were working (apparently, the noise will keep
her from falling asleep, but not wake her up once she is asleep). So we trekked over
to Dad’s favorite Carpinteria watering hole, Island
Brewing Company. We walked (the whole 2 blocks) over and had pints of Jubilee
Ale with pretzels for munchies. New east side access point where the camillia
used to be rooted.

New south side access point under the current master bedroom.

Under house excavation. Notice that the sewage pipe has been wrapped
to protect it from the stress of the concrete. Also, you can see the depth of hole
from the grade at the base of the cement pier.

The garage doors have been ordered, and we are waiting on an installation date. In the meantime, it is time to go under the house. We have to dig out 14 3’x3’x12″ cement pads under the house as foundation to the posts that will support the new construction. This is very slow work and is not conducive to good pictures. However, we have been moving the camillia (sp?) bushes into the new raised planter.

And
a fun pic of Lucy