Exiting our Quarry Period

Although we still only have a hole in the ground, we're about to move to the next stage. It's been a hard fought battle, but Lee from Rock On has now triumphed and the site is ready for the forms and then it's on to pouring the foundation.

Lee did some great work at the rear of the house and now has a good part of the grade merging in with the existing landscape. He also built up a small area that allowed us to stand and see the exact view we would have from our rear patio. For the first time, I can visualize the house on the site. When I told Kim that, my sensitive wife said that she has been able to do that 'for weeks'.

I think Wes is the most relived that we're moving past excavation, as our phone conversations started to feel more like therapy sessions as he ushered me through the process. I wonder if I can submit some bills to my HMO?

Yesterday we reviewed the site with Lee and Wes and also met with Bill Seguin, who has bid on the Geothermal HVAC system. We located the wells and talked about the possibility of using radiant heat in the basement and maybe a gas fired direct hot water heater.

Gary from GMPH & Sons, who will be our plumber also stopped by to coordinate schedules. He'll do some initial work during the foundation phase, but will then coordinate with the HVAC contractor once the house has a roof and walls.

During a lull in the conversation, we joked about the movie 'Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House'. Turns out that the house that inspired the novel and movie is in New Milford, and still stands in the Merryall section of town.

Below are some shots of the site, cleaned up and ready for forms. The next post will have foundation shots.

Rocks

There is now a very large piece of equipment on-site with only one purpose .... make many, many smaller rocks out of many large ones.

In order to make the site more manageable, Lee will be moving these smaller rocks down to areas that will eventually have retaining walls.

Post Blast Clean-up

Kim and I stopped up at the site Friday afternoon between visiting the dentist and a session with Wes to discuss the various bids and some minor changes to the plans.  The first thing we noticed, and it was pretty hard to miss, was the driveway toward the top of the site was gone.  While we were blasting anyway, we decided to blast some of the ledge off of the driveway to lessen the slope.  Lee had already dragged out the blasted rock, so the only way up now was by foot.

Now that the blasting is done, Lee needs to spend some time doing what he calls 'organizing' the site.  I get what he means as right now there are piles of large rock all over the place.  First he's going to use a lot of the large excess pieces to fill in areas that need it and I guess then that will be covered with dirt.  Once that's done, they he can get back to digging out the foundation and sifting through the remaining rocks for us to use in fill and our various landscaping products.

Below are a couple of other shots ... basically the entire site curtain is now a quarry.