The Bloody Trench is Finally Full of Gravel

My dad and I finally filled the trench with gravel. After installing expanded polystyrene foam around the inside edge (see picture below, the supervisor kitty or fore cat is in the foreground) we filled and leveled the gravel trench.
As with most filling operations, this one had to be done about eight inches at a time with regular packing. My father will freely tell you that shovelling 1.5" gravel is no fun. In the above picture you can also see the waste plumbing pipe coming through the trench. It is now under about 1' of gravel.

After the gravel, we dug the interior footer trench (below, top) and started in on the forms (below, both) for the grade beam. I see cement trucks in our future.

Friday the 13th, Waiting for the Inspector

I'm back.

After over two months without working on the project because of equipment and weather difficulties, I'm back at it . Those two months were not totally spent baking bread and reading the New Yorker. Amanda and I took a nice week-long vacation to California. When we got home, 260 native trees and bushes arrived in the mail from a State of New Mexico sponsored reforestation program. It took me the better part of a week, but I planted all the seedlings around our property and encased them in protective plastic tubes. The tubes are not much to look at, and Amanda has taking to calling our house "Blue Tube Farms," but almost all of the plants have leafed out and are becoming established. The following is a picture of some of the tubes.
After planting the trees, I put in the garden (which you can see to the right of the tubes in the above photograph). It turned out our soil was devoid of the three major nutrients, so I had to bring in 8 cubic yards of compost and numerous boxes of blood and bone meal to get everything up to snuff. After rototilling in the amendments, I piled the soil from the path onto the beds and then filled the paths in with chipped wood. A few cold frames and a fence surrounding the whole 65ft x 45 ft space, and I was ready to plant.




















This photo is about 10 days old, we have some little plants popping up now.

Back to the shop...

My father, Jim, is staying with us for a month or so and he has been helping me catch up on the building. So far we have finished digging the foundation and drainage trenches as witnessed in the following poorly composed panorama (the building will be rectangular, I swear).
This foundation system is known as a rubble trench foundation and was popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright in most of his homes and was also used extensively in ancient times (think Roman and Egyptian). After we finished the trench , we lined it with a filter fabric and installed a 4 inch drain pipe. The pipe (and trench) slopes from the upper right to the lower left where it will conduct the water away from the foundation trench and into another deeper trench filled with gravel. You can barely see the drainage trench in the lower left corner of the following photograph.
That brings us to sitting around on Friday the 13th, waiting for the building inspector to come and inspect the trench and pipe so we can fill the trench with rubble (rocks of various sizes--no marble statues to be broken up and used for fill. Alas) and move on to pouring the grade beam.

Stay tuned.