Stay in Seattle

Stay in Seattle

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Next up was carrying gravel around the recently poured foundation and placing it on top of drainage pipe (with holes on the bottom) that Mickie placed around the house. Here is the pile of gravel (to the left and close to the road where it was dumped) along with the edge of the foundation that I had to carry it along.
We started at the far corner from the gravel pile so that I wasn't climbing over filled in sections. Mickey would put down the drain pipe over a water permeable sort of cloth and I would cover it with gravel carried around in two buckets. They have machines that can do it, but they use about four times as much gravel, making it more expensive with all the wasted gravel.
On Tuesday I finished spreading the gravel and we laid a layer of cloth over the gravel and Mickey put up another set of pipes without holes to take water from the rain gutters away from the house. The cloth is water permeable so that water can get in, but hopefully not silt to block the pipe. Last step was to throw a little dirt on the top cloth to hold it in place until the backhoe can bury it.
While I was spreading gravel in the garage of the house at the top of the hill, a couple of guys came in to install installation. They did it all in one morning (they were fast). To reach high places like the ceiling, they stood on stilts. It was way cool (and very fast). I should have gotten a little video. Oh well, too late for that.
On Wednesday, the backhoe started filling in the interior of the house for a slab basement as well as the outside around the foundation. He also was digging the sewer line (shown here). There is a really short two second video (about 48K, 16 seconds to download) of him filling in around the foundation and a five second video (about 120K, 40 seconds to download) of him digging the sewer line. In this picture you can also see the foam insulation that Mickey had put inside the foundation before the backhoe filled for the slab.
On Thursday the backhoe was joined by a trench digging backhoe (shown here) and a regular bulldozer. The trench digging backhoe waited for a couple of hours while the front end loader flattened the area where the electrical trench was needed. They were all from the same company.
The bulldozer pushed the dirt which was piled up along the road and filled in the gap next to the foundation. Then he pushed more of the dirt into the area where the garage will be. There is a really short two second video (about 40K, 16 seconds to download) of him pushing dirt into the garage with the original backhoe in the background filling in the other foundation areas.
Things are winding down for me as Mickie gets all caught up. I was down in the crawl space of the bottom house (it has no basement as the grade was too steep). I was cleaning out the miscellaneous trash that had been left down there previously and straightening the plastic that covers the dirt floor of the crawl space. However, they were finishing the dry wall there and also used stilts to do high work. I was able to get a short video (five seconds, 120K, about 40 seconds to download) of him working.
The front end loader finished in a couple of hours and then the trench digger started digging the trench in front of the house for the electrical line. He dug it, put in the electrical conduits, and filled it in by the afternoon. The original backhoe finished his filling in and started digging the foundation for the fourth (and final) house at the very bottom of the hill.
The last step of the backhoe was to level the lawn and such and for that he grabbed an I-beam girder and used it as a sort of front end loader. Pretty neat trick I thought.
On Wednesday (before I left) Mickie had me help lay out the rebar for the garage up the hill. On Friday I drilled most of the holes into the newly laid foundation for where the rebar would go. All was very interesting. However, on Thursday evening I had set my camera battery to charging while I used the library. Then I got busy and left it. Yikes! I picked it up Friday evening, but couldn't take the pictures I wanted during the day before I left. Drats!
On September 21 and 22 I went to the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. It started at 10AM and ran to Sunday evening non-stop (with Beth and Brian staying through the night). We weren't so intense as some of the teams and enjoyed ourselves. We got about ten of the 30 or so puzzles and gave up at about 2PM. Here are Greg, Albert, Beth, Brian, Cary, and James (Amy and Brian not shown). There is another web page with more about the puzzle hunt.

This page was last updated on January 1, 2004