Progress is sweet

Finally, after four months, we're looking at something BESIDES a hole in the ground!  The concrete guys have been here all day, every day, getting the footings and the foundation walls poured.  It looks pretty spectacular, and it's going very quickly.  We've had a few scary "uh oh" moments (like, "oh hey, your ledge is cracked!"), but we trust our concrete guy (and so does Echo).  Actually, Echo loves the concrete guy.  Over the last week, he has gone from his suspicious "who's here?" bark, to sitting by the door, whining, and wagging his tail at 6:30 every morning.  Normally, he waits by his food for me to get up. But no, now he waits for Bob.  Bob talks about taking him home, and I'm starting to feel like Echo would happily go.

Anyways, I finally have pictures!  A blog is no fun without pictures.

To start, we had to pump out the giant hole in the ground.  As I'm sure many of you have gleaned from this blog, it's rained here.  A lot.  Every time it rains, the folks at the hardware store have been kind enough to set aside the pump for us to rent.  We've now had to rent it six times.

We should have started a refugee camp for frogs, as they escaped en masse from the pit.  There was also a litanny of other creepy crawlies that I took pictures of but will give me nightmares if I have to look at them again.  Once that was dry, we had to shovel dirt off the rocks. Finally, the concrete guys came, measured out the exact dimensions for the footings (oh, hey, remember how I said they could be exact because they had lasers?  Guess what they came equipped with?), and got to work making the molds for the footings.  

Making the molds for the footings

Concrete!

This add-on, 12x48, is where the horse stalls will go.

Making the footing walls

Echo overseeing operations (Jereme thinks he's the GC on all of this, but it's really the dog).

I can't even express how nice it is to see progress being made.  Seeing no changes with fall creeping in was starting to give us this desperate, panicked, OMG-We'll-Be-Homeless feeling.  As of now, we will probably be stuck in the RV until mid-late October.  That will be a whole other barrel of interesting, as it's already starting to get very cold at night.  The leaves on some of the trees are changing.  I keep yelling at them to knock that shit off, but they're not listening. 

The walls have to set (cure?) for seven days, and then Jereme will backfill in the floor.  So, in about a week and a half, we'll have Bob the Concrete Guy come back and pour the slab.  I am very, very insistent that we put our hand prints (and paw prints) in the floor.  Jereme says no, but he is no fun.  

Everyone tells us this will be worth it when it's over, and I believe them.  This view:

makes everything worth it.  But more than that, this house/barn is so much more than just a house.  Warning:  I'm about to go into a little bit of sniffly sentimentality in a rare moment of transparency.  Anyways, there are a lot of things in my life I regret.  Like...a LOT.  Basically, my life until recent years is one, long, horrifyingly morbid blooper reel.  It would be really easy to say I wish I could go back and have a do-over, save myself a lot of heartache (and therapy time), but I'm a big believer in serendipity, and I firmly believe that any change, no matter how minute, would have lead me to NOT be at Highland Mountain Bike park on that day in July, and I would not have met my husband.  

This house represents erasing all of that, to me.  It is the final nail in putting everything in my past, his past, and our history together behind us.  We have been through hell and back together, and this is really leaving all the baggage behind and starting over, together.  No home town drama, nothing.  I really believe that this will be something extraordinary, and I try to give him that same sense of faith, too, because he often needs encouragement.  So, until we are living in that house, I will be the one keeping the faith and quietly pushing forward.