A Hole to Call Home

The rain didn't slow us down a bit yesterday! Woo Hoo! Miss Dig showed up in time for Ken Hoekwater (the excavator) to do what he needed to do on the front half of the property so that's good to. Check out the video:

The soil turned out to be in really good shape for building a house. There was a little bit of topsoil/fill on the crest of the hill that Ken had to dig through to get to original clay for the footings to sit on - maybe 5 feet or so. But for the most part, the clay is solid and uniform which is exactly what you want for a foundation to sit on. Ken is an absolute artist with the excavator. It looks like the foundation was dug with a spoon. The basement floor is as smooth and even as can be without being covered in concrete. The footing trenches are uniform and clean. It's really quite impressive.




They also didn't have to truck out as much dirt as they thought they might, which will save us some money. The house sits back a little further than they envisioned, so not as much of the hill had to be removed as they thought.

Today, if the rain continues to hold, we'll have footings and maybe foundation walls by the end of the week!

Last night we had a long meeting with Rich from True North Homes and went through a TON of paperwork paragraph by paragraph. It wasn't terribly exciting, but to us, it was evidence that Rich is REALLY thorough. That's one of the things we really like about True North - they pay attention to the details and make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed before they do anything. That makes us MUCH more comfortable with the whole process. We covered the warranty that comes with the home (which is really good), a lot of process details about how the money is transfered from us to the title company to True North, details about the bid process and how we'll select certain options as the bids come in.

We even picked out our windows (energy star rated, of course!). They are JELD-WEN all vinyl with low-e glass. Vinyl is a SIGNIFICANT cost savings over wood (40%) and are lower maintenance. We wanted white trim anyway and now we'll never have to keep up with painting them.