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Tomorrow may finally be dig day.

As you can tell by the web cams, the excavator did not arrive today – something about needing to finish grading the bottom of an excavation and a problem with ground water and lack of pump.

So I spent the day further preparing.  I made two large piles of dirt; first was the one mixed with various debris, and second was just dirt and rocks.  This will help speed up the loading of the first trucks and was the top few inches from under the house once it was torn down, and the old water fall and pond areas at the back that was full of bind-weed.

After some chores (send the failed shed cam back to FOSCAM) and a nap (yes a nap – I have not had a day off for months and I was done), I then started in on re-stacking all of the long 2x material I have salvaged and that Eric had de-nailed.  I first made a rack (photos to come) for the shorter items and then moved the wood to both the rack and a spot at grade where it will be out of way of the excavation. Now I only have the salvaged siding left to move.

I also ran power, via an areal power chord (which you can see running horizontal across the middle of the street cam), over to the cutting shack.  Finally, I started putting roll roofing on the cutting shack.

Yesterday I started the day by fixing the tarp (I hope for the last time).  I had to lower the main line and preposition and tighten the tarp retention strap on the south side. This time I cut away the garden hose so the clamp was right on metal ( I slid a garden house over the cable to help protect the tarp from chafing).  I had to lower and raise 3 times to get the retention point in the right place so that it spread the tarp out but still allowed the tension to be on the cable and not the tarp.  Of course this meant that the tarp further re-positioned itself so that it was of equal tension to all of the ties downs.  This resulted in a counter clockwise rotation with more of it ending up near Ron’s house to the North.  This meant I had a water pooling issue and had to rejig the attachments in this location to form a funnel that the water could flow down. To this I fashioned a downspout connected to roll-out plastic downspout that will take the water to a storm grate in the neighbours yard (photo to come).

While taking with my father-in-law about the tarp raising (he has been gone from site for 1-1/2 weeks), I figured out what I will do if I have a heavy snow.  I will just let the main line down and let the tarp rest on what ever part of the building that has been completed to date.  This will take all pressure off the tie down lines and will probably even allow me to clean it off.

I then worked further at digging down around the tree at the NW corner of the build.  I ended up with a 5ft+ deep by 4ft wide trench all the way around the jog.  This is the area where I am going to need to put the concrete blocks.  The bank here will need to be undercut in order to get enough room between the foundation and blocks. I will just make sure the root zone is not effected (only down a foot or so) and so will dig this area deep enough so the blocks can slide in under the root zone.  I suspect that the placement of the tree on the original survey was off as in my drawing I had lots of room and I also double checked the recent surveyed markings for the footing batter boards and they are right on.

Finally I spread out the wood shavings left behind by Burley Boys to protect the root zone behind the tree fencing as I will also be using this area as a pedestrian way during the build.

So lets hope a really big machine shows up tomorrow and we can finally start the big dig.

Thanks for visiting.

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