Week 7 -- Rain, rain go away....

Yep,  the rains came for real this past week.  Like rains are here.  Rarely heavy,  but always possible.  Lots of mist.  Only now and then do your clothes actually get very wet,  but everything outside is pretty much wet from the constant misting.   It is really time for us to get up out of the ground.... that's what I took from it.

We're nearly there,  but not quite yet.  There is the matter of getting the outside of the basement walls prepared for backfilling.  We would like to get the earth that we took out back into the big trench around the basement walls before a lot of rain washes it away.  Of course, all waterproofing of the outside of the basement walls has to be done before that, so we finished applying a brush applied waterproofing,  and are nearly finished installing a "dimple shield."  That's basically a sheet of plastic with lots of bumps pushed up,  and a layer of fabric on top that keeps the soil from filling in the voids between the bumps.   The idea is that the water that makes its way up to the wall of the basement (which we have presumably waterproofed... but this seems worth double  protection) will trickle down through the pimply dimples, and then into a gravel  covered drain pipe at the bottom of the trench.   You can see the part that we've finished pretty well on this picture.  
Suffice it to say it looks and sounds easier than it turned out to be. Especially nasty was installing the layer that goes 4 feet off the ground,  but we are nearly done. It is my great  hope to be done tomorrow (Monday) and then to get to  work on one last set of seismic reinforcements before we can  install the plywood decking on top of the now finished floor frame. I've even rented a pneumatic nail gun - despite my great love of hand driving two thousand nails ,  and my bad memories of one of my  Innova workers who always seemed to aim the nail gun at parts of himself.

The addition of the floor joists has the basement feeling more like a basement now:
In fact,  we'll probably move Jennifer's stairmaster into here this week, and give it a little tent all its own.

I really hope my next post shows some movement UP to the first floor walls.... but only time will tell,  eh....  


Best to y'all... send an e mail now and then. And by the way. If any of you can tell me how to control these line breaks that jump into words.... HELP they are driving me nuts. THanks for your patience in reading it that way.