Kitchen Floor, Almost the Last Footing!

Most of this week has been spent excavating the footing for the kitchen/dining room. While the footing is very close to the same dimensions as other footings, our previous experiences have made us much more efficient. We made the cut and kept the levels with much more precision than in the past. There is also an intermediate footing that will support the Amdeck,  creating a crawl space behind the cellar.

The huge pile of dirt thrown over from the footing above was smaller,  thanks to all of the backfilling,  but there was still too much dirt in the way... 

... so we spent a few days bucketing the dirt on top of the nicely compacted areas of backfill. It seems inefficient,  since it will all have to be removed and replaced 6' at a time,  but I had to stockpile the dirt somewhere so we could continue building!  The stockpiled dirt is so high behind the livingroom that I can now walk right up onto the back part of the lot!

Also this week,  I had a big steel order delivered,  enough to finish the kitchen floor and get the Master Bedroom walls started.

Once the dirt pile was cleared,  we did the fine tuning,  cut the "key",  and started laying in the steel.  By the end of the week,  all of the stirrups were in place!

The Kitchen was not the only digging we did!  When ever there was a free laborer,  I had them working on the trench to connect to the sewer.  

They also dug a pit at the street property line to look for the "lateral",  the pipe that supposedly was placed from the sewer main to my property line back in 1961 when they put the sewer in.  I was concerned about this,  because the official computerized city maps showed the connection coming off of the manhole,  yet when I pulled off the manhole cover there was no pipe coming in.  To add a new lateral connection is a very expensive project,  so I went back to the city for more information.  I found a helpful person who went back to the original hand drawn maps from 1961.  It clearly showed the location of the lateral as coming from a point down the sewer line,  NOT right from the manhole.  We dug a pit based on this old map ... 

... and found the lateral,  right where the old map said it would be!  All we had to do was follow the hole that was compacted fill,  and it lead us right to the connection.  Here is the hole,  with a bucket covering the actual connection.  I know it seems like a silly thing to get excited about,  but I was thrilled to find it!  

Next week,  the rest of the steel gets placed, as well as more underground ducting,  and the forms get installed!