Good News and Bad News

Above, work is progressing, but it sure looks like a mess!

It’s been a wild week. I stopped over at the site on a Monday morning two weeks ago, and enough progress had been made so that the basement windows had the window bucks in. This gave me a good perspective on exactly where the basement windows were going to be and I was NOT HAPPY. The tops of the basement windows are at least a foot below ground. All the drawings had indicated that the tops of the basement windows were at ground level. Since the windows are two feet high, that puts the window three feet below ground with a window well 3 ½ to 4 feet deep. That’s halfway down to the foundation! Since the ground is pure clay, there’s going to have to be one hell of a drainage system to get rid of water in a heavy downpour, or the window wells will fill up and water will come in through the windows. I put a stop to the work for a day so I could think about what I wanted to do. If I raised up the windows, I had to raise up the entire first floor. It would have been a huge additional expense. The two front windows in the basement will be mostly above ground, and will let in light to the family room and bedroom, so I guess I can live with the side windows being below ground.

Above, you can see that the south basement windows are definitely below ground. Below pictures, the walls are up high enough so that the floor trusses can be put in.

These pictures were taken Saturday morning (October 18th). The floor trusses are in. You can see one of the guys has just laid the first piece of floorboard.
At the end of Saturday, not many floorboards had been laid. The whole floor was supposed to have been finished.
Here are 278 pavers I got at the ReUse Center. Not sure what exactly I'll use them for, but I have a few possibilities. I got a good deal on them. I almost broke my back loading and unloading them, though. First, I had to put them on a cart at the ReUse Center, then unload them from the cart to the truck, and then from the truck to the pallet at the house.

Below, just the finished floor trusses first thing Saturday.