Looking Back on Week 2

 Just like "back east" (as is said here) the climate seems to know the meaning of Labor Day weekend.  It's been immensely cooler and even a bit moist.  This morning 
Jennifer took 
this from her stairmaster:

Not nearly as tired this weekend – even though the physical work was just as hard and there was less opportunity for sleep given our desire to see various of the Dem. Conv. speeches!

As the week ended I still felt a little down about the rate of progress, even as I know that the nature of construction ALWAYS is that things take way longer than you expect them to.
But looking through the pictures and remembering where things were at the end of week 1 is reminding me that a whole lot got done this week. It’s just that a big part of the work accomplished this week was NOT done by us. Rather the basement slab was poured.

Several times during the course of this week Sebastian and I had to move out of the way of Fred – concrete subcontractor– and his workers so that they could finish up placing
the gravel, the vapor barrier, and then the concrete slab.


One good thing about these activities is that they served to entertain our guests – Jennifer’s sister Lydia and her three sons – who understandably found the flinging of sand, gravel & concrete a lot more interesting than the placement of block after block would have been.
Here Willie, Spencer & Teddy concentrate on gravel placement & initial slab smoothing:
 



In honor of the visit, and the end of summer (Oy, please not yet) Jennifer took the week off. She started out by borrowing our neighbor’s “flail” – a tractor attachment – so that she could clear various of our paths of blackberrys, brambles, nettles and poison oak and render them pleasantly passable again. In fact, she cleared a blackberry picking walk that she and the boys took, harvesting enough of our weed fruit for Lydia to make a fabulous crisp. I think that only about ½ of what was picked actually made it back to the house:
 
On Wednesday, because the basement slab was being poured, Sebastian & I worked on placing gutters and a silly little shelter over the doorway of the mobile home, instead of working on the house at all. (The spots of rain we’ve gotten here and there demonstrated that without these we were going to be VERY muddy in the mobile because the roof run off pretty much entered the door and windows directly.)

Here’s what that’s looking like today. It’s not that we didn’t get blocks laid. We did.
Monday and Tuesday were more about getting the hang of it. Thursday and Friday things moved a little more quickly.

And blocks isn't  all of what's goin' on,  either. Sebastian has been good at bending rebar and getting it into place. Most of that is horizontal, and visible in this picture if you look closely. 
Probably harder to make out on the web are the vertical cages at the inside corners
which make threading the corner blocks a bit of a chore.  THey will support a lot of weight when we get up into the 
higher reaches of the house. 

OK.   That's it for me at the end of week 2!  In case anybody is actually reading this, and is intersted in the goal of this experience at the gulag,  on FLickr I posted some pics of a model that I built a while ago.  The topographical setting is yet to be added, but the building model is there.  I think you can go there by clicking this:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/61764597@N00/2792962069/


Remember to send an e mail now and then,  cuz I miss yous.