Stephen has been working out @ the land 2 evenings a week and has finished framing up the walls for the pump house. These are just 2x4 stick framed walls to get it up quick and since the slab was a bit small there wasnt any way to go any thicker. The walls are 8 ft high and will eventually have a gable metal roof and an old 32" maple door that we salvaged from chico.



The road was completed by Jack White with Whites Excavating. Here he is spreading the road base.



And the top of the finished road with a T. I realized after seeing the T I didnt want a T. :) And so they are gonna come back out and make a larger area to park in. I dont have a good pic of the road yet but will try and get one from one of the high hills sometime soon.



During that time we also had Mike Clark a local excavator dig out the 18" wide 12" deep foundation footing trench for our Ag Building foundation. That is pictured below. Couldnt have even tried to dig that trench without a heavy duty machine since the dried dirt/clay is as hard as rock!



The following week, Stephen, Ray, Renee and Alfred all went out to get the wood forms for the Ag Building Monolithic Concrete Slab Foundation. It was a hot Sunday morning and we worked from 8am to Noon. By Noon it was way too hot to keep going and anyway we ran out of long stakes. We setup steel stakes to create a square based on the 2 parallel lines and a hypotnuse measurement. It worked out pretty well except that we moved the Ag building further south to be closer to the house and of course the area we had leveled was a bit further north. So the formwork needed to be much higher on the South side to accommodate the slope a bit. Here is a pic of me and Alfred hammering in stakes to attach the form boards to.



Here is the west side foundation footing already formed in and you can see the 5 cu. yds of gravel that we had dumped in the center to form the gravel base for the 4" slab. This of course you shall see had to be manually leveled and moved around by Alfred and myself.



A view of the 3 sides of the formwork completed.



The next week, Alfred and Stephen went out to level the gravel bed which took quite a good deal of elbow grease. Stephen ordered a bit too much gravel ;) so we moved a lot of it around or actually Alfred moved most of it while Stephen did the leveling. Sitting at a computer all day doesnt prepare you much for such back breaking labor. But as Alfred pointed out its all in the technique.



So this coming weekend, Alfred and Stephen will be finishing the formwork and laying the plastic then the wire reinforcing mesh netting over the gravel. Hopefully we will have time to do the rebar in the footing then call in the pour for the following week.

In other news, we found out that the 2 straw bale engineers we were considering are both extremely busy. We anticipate we will not be able to get our structural calcs done until winter which means we wont be able to start building the main house until early Spring 2004. Ug. Oh well...so building a house takes a good amount of patience and waiting. Nothing ever happens in the time frame you plan it in.

We also went to the Tehama County Building Department for the first time to meet one of the Inspectors and introduce ourselves and our project. We donated a copy of the CASBA published Building Inspectors Guide to Straw Bale, Serious Straw Bale and an E-Crete Technical Manual. They were pretty interested and seemed excited about the project. What a relief ... of course with all the Building Dept. Horror stories weve heard of this was good to know that they were going to treat this just like any other project. Which is how it should be. Things are moving ... over and out.