setbacks, ugh

so what we thought was a pretty damn nice hole, was apparently not so nice for removing forms from concrete walls... so they showed up on tuesday, marked how much bigger we needed to make it and said they'd be back at some point later in the week... twas not a fun couple days... especially not the first where DH was all worked up and hating life and such. fortis also didn't show up to hook up our temporary box so we could restore power to the house. once he calmed down and just got to work, he wasn't too bad.

so we spend that evening working on it, but of course, there's only so many hours in a day to get things done. the digging machine was also having issues (a collapsed fuel line which dh fixed the next morning) so it was slowing us down since we had to build a "bridge" (read: fill in hole with dirt that was already removed) and it was not cooperating and kept stalling out. we did our best and worked like little worker bees until probably 10pm and even through the 30+min rain shower, but we still weren't done. not even close. we made the decision to take the next day off work so we could just get it finished and ready for concrete. the next day, it was just me and dh working, which, since its our house, is perfectly fine. we were actually working really well with eachother. i was surprised since the last time we did a home reno project together, we argued all the time. so that morning, our windows finally got ordered and we did a ton of work. we had finished by the end of the day and we even had our power hooked up! it was great  : )  however, we did pay for it, well probably me more than him, with how sore our muscles were after almost a week of digging... i did just about all the handwork (with some help here and there) and he did all the work from a seat in a machine...

the pump-er-thingy for concrete

saturday morning, concrete finally showed up. finally we were getting somewhere isntead of just having a temporary bike pit set up, lol. dh wasn't home that day, so i had the joy of jumping out of bed as soon as they pulled up in case they came knocking on the door (they didn't) so that i wasn't answering in my pj's without a bra, lol.

funny story:
while they were setting up the forms, i could hear them talking and one guy asked inquisitively, "i wonder how they made the hole bigger? we definately don't have a problem removing forms now, haha." and the other guy guessed exactly what we had done. oh how i wish we didn't have to do all that work to get that accomplished, but it had to be done...

so they poured the footings and i took some obligatory pictures and then they were gone. no one asked us for money, didn't tell us what to do if it rained like crazy, nothing. well that's not entirely true, i asked about the money, but they said their boss wasn't in town anymore and that we should contact him to find out... they came back on tuesday to set up the forms and pour the walls. it rained a bit like crazy for about an hour and i think they decided to take a break while the weather was being stupid. they came back later in the afternoon and the best sight of all greeted me when i came home:

CONCRETE!!!

they came back the next day and removed the forms. dh was a little upset at the anchoring system they chose, talked to a few ppl to see if it was an asinine thing or common (apparently my word doens't count for much even though i'm in the damn profession) and he's okay with it, not happy, but okay. he's made a point that if we ever build a new house, that we will definately not be using this method... yeah, in like never! i'm not moving!!!

so now we have all of our concrete walls done and our foundation inspection is tomoro. then we have to wait another 2 weeks (the time dh wants to wait before we backfill, we were only going to wait a week...) before we can move all the dirt back and then get working on some other things, like trenching for conduit, the slab, framing, drywell, all sorts of fun stuff, lol. so we're well on our way now and there's filling the hole and abondoning the whole thing as there will be evidence seen if we do that such as a concrete wall sticking out the ground  :-P