It was exciting for me to watch the first finish on our home taking shape this week.
After the foundation concrete has cured for a month, we can backfill, or place soil up against the foundation walls to bring it up to more-or-less finish grade. At this step it’s necessary to bury “chases” or ducts for telephone, electrical, water, and natural gas to provide a passage for these services to get from the road to the house. We have to locate the connections at the lot line. Unfortunately, our lot line has moved about 40 feet or so since the services were installed. Our natural gas and electrical connections are in fact on our neighbour’s lot, across his paved driveway, and will require considerably more digging and expense to locate and hook up.
We are anxious to hook up electricity especially, so that we can shut the generator up. So, backfilling is important.
We needed to import 24 more truckloads of sand to fill in behind the 14′ foundation wall.
Much more fun is watching the drama of bringing in a truckload of big boulders, which could, without very careful control, continue rolling down the hill to crush an RV or a storage shed or a bear who might be walking across their path.
Steve, the machine operator, has such precise control that he could pick up, with his one-yard bucket, a stick that’s 1/2″ in diameter and place it into a scrap pile. (I’m sure he just does this as a parlour trick! Oh, wait, I guess the excavator wouldn’t fit into a parlour.)
Steve placed the great rocks at the edge of the driveway, to create our very first finished “something”, a rock garden. I was itching to go out to buy daffodil and tulip bulbs, but controlled this urge.
