Why this burst of blogging? Today was a travel day to Kansas City (I have to look at a site). But, I’ve been bumped, not once, but twice. First go round Delta was confused and classified me as ‘involuntarily bumped’…..offered me my choice, $400 voucher or $670 check. Enough said. Then they booked me on the next flight, even though they knew it was oversold. So, volunteered again and bumped again, this time with a $400 voucher.
Seven hours in the airport. Well worth it; got a fair bit of work done as well.
Anyway, we’ve been busy at Casa de Graystone. And while things have been slow for the last two weeks, we’re looking at completing renovations this week.
Phase One was having the roof done. This is not the best picture to see the color we had (still visible on the porch, all black) and the color we are going to (on the roof, gray). Suzanne and I thought we were going for a darker gray, but, didn’t really work out that way.
Phase Two was expanding the porch…..if you look here, and above, you’ll see that we wiped out the bushes that were in front of the house (wait, let me get a photo)
Wow….what a sad story of dead trees. The cherry on the left? dead. The maple you can see on the right? dead. And we wiped out the bushes to the left of the door years ago. The four in front of the window disappeared this year….just impossible to trim/maintain.
This picture is at least five/six years old
Anyway….we talked…and talked…and talked about how to do the porch. We wanted it to look the same from the street all the way across; put decking over the existing concrete and a face board to make it all look like wood? or just pour more concrete and add brick. After multiple attempts at pricing materials and labor, ended up realizing concrete would be cheaper (more on this later).
So, you can see the contractor with a rented backhoe excavating out dirt for the footer. That pile of dirt you see there kills me….I asked before we began about excess soils and suggested, hey, you have to add quite a bit of dirt where you are pouring concrete…you’re going to move the dirt there. “Nope, don’t want to do that”. This decision a) cost the contractor a lot of extra time and b) destroyed more of my front yard than necessary. So, I don’t have a lot of sympathy right now for his overage on labor…..for this, and for other reasons.
Footer excavated; formwork placed, concrete being poured. You can notice how low the ground is between the footer and the brick wall….the contractor ended up having to shovel dirt back into this area to get up to grade later on.
Cement pouring through the forms….
et cetera. The boys really really really enjoyed the concrete truck visiting our house….
Almost done…
Of course, fresh cement in an area that’s never going to be seen again means it’s time to get our hands and names set in stone….
Concrete block foundation….you’ll note that we’re still not filled up inside the wall for the concrete, even though a great deal of concrete rubble and dirt has been shoveled over there.
Brick. About as close in color as we could come….the ‘group’ had about half bricks that were close and half that didn’t, so, they tried to put the ‘not matching’ bricks near the bottom.
Still more soils shoveled up behind the wall….
Almost ready for the second cement pour….formwork going into place.
The 2nd truck….boys not so impressed this time. You can see the plywood to try and protect the cement…I did end up with a crack on the sidewalk from the weight….
The comment about holding up the pole is too easy….It is also very appropriate…
To make everything look the same we tore down the soffet to replace it with the new ‘look’ so it will all be the same. Turns out that sometime in the past we were home to more than our fair share of wasps…….
Several years back there was a big wasp nest in the neighbor’s tree one year….then it was in our maple tree up front the next year (this had to have been when Kevin was little, and not really climbing that tree). I guess they wasps decided to use the crawl space here either the year before those two sightings or the year after…..all dead now though
There was a long delay between pouring of the cement and getting to this point….my patience with our contractor grew (and has grown) mighty thin. His house-keeping is poor, so, there’s been materials scattered everywhere, and you can probably tell that soils-management is a sore spot also….best decision I ever made was to insist on paying the materials…..he’s kind of stuck on his labor price now, and I know that it’s been a debacle for him. I feel a little bad, but not much, a lot of the extra work he has brought on himself.
Where we are as of this morning….man I hope he’s done by the time I get back from Kansas City!
