See the wet walls? The clay/mud is really tough to walk on!! Well we spent a lot of time laying out 6 mill black plastic to act as our vapor barrier. Laying the plastic was a challenge; it was raining and a good breeze was blowing but we go it done and anchored. Our next step was to lay out all the foam insulation and get all the seams as tight as possible and we did not place foam over the footings

Huge event on the horizon for us. our supplier just delivered our Formular 250! We are going to have in slab hot water heat so we have to insulate the underside of the slab to drive ALL the heat up-wards and into the basement.

What a huge problem we have! The plumbers ran the waste pipe into the basement digging into the ground for correct elevation. The problem was they shoveled our good Iowa clay on top of our “pea” gravel. Now Debra and I have to shovel the clay into buckets and hoist over the walls and dispose of it. Lesson learned, have the contractor know exactly what you want done and how out want it finished, we didn’t and now we are doing the hard labor.

This needs to be done first thing in construction. I waited to long and had a huge mess! Contractors do not listen when you tell them where your lot line is, they need a visual. I spent hours with a shovel cleaning up the neighbor(s) yards!

Something to keep in mind, when you run new sewer and water there will be concrete work somewhere in the process! We had to cut out a pretty large section of the street to make our connection $’s. One conciliation we discovered a place in the street that water was getting through to the substructure and eroding it away. Finding it now save the tax payers (me) some big dollars down the road when the street would have failed.

Well we are committed now, the pipes are in the ground:) The wooden square is for the shower drain and the larger PVC pipe is toilet and the smaller PVC supports the kitchen and bathroom vanity. A lot of thinking and planning went into the placement of the drains, our intent is to have an apartment on the west half of the basement and a large play room with workout area on the east side. Digging was horrible, the clay kept sticking to the shovels, made for a long day.

Here they are putting in our sewer line to the street. Seems like we dig and fill one hole and someone comer right behind us and digs another one. I had no idea how we were going to connect to the city, I guess the plumbing contractor I hired did that for us. Notice how the trench is wider at the top and narrows at the bottom, that is for cave in protection, something I leaned today.

There’s my Beamer sitting on the driveway, looks pretty steep to me, what do you think? Right behind the driveway is an alley with the neighbors fence behind that.

Neat bit of information, the blue line will be the height of the concrete slab. The concrete crew uses this line to level the concrete as it’s being poured. I can only guess how we’ll use a chauld line!?

Here we go, all backfilled and looking pretty good. Debra and I have concerns on the steepness of the driveway into the garage, it looks kind of steep and with Iowa winters steep in not a good word. We’ll think on this for a while. It does look steep!