Ryan's Graduation!

This is easier than sending a bunch of pix in email, and I forgot how to do the flicker thingie, so here ya go!

Ryan and Meg at the awards ceremony on Wednesday...

Part of Ryan's fan club at the Friday awards ceremony:

The graduation celebration!

The whole crew, including David's friend Kristina and Ryan's friend Jobie

The happy grad...

The travelers leaving for India, Sunday afternoon...

Foundation Poured!

Here as a few pictures of the foundation that was poured on 5-19-12, the same day as Ryan's graduation, ( which was fabulous!).

See if you can identify my trusted advisors in the background. :-)

The next step is to form the columns with more rebar and 16 inch square forms.  These will go over the vertical rebar sticking up every 12 feet or so, and then pour them with more concrete.

Here are a couple pix taken on 5-25-12 after some of the formwork has been removed:

Foundation Progress continues...

The steel is being assembled and installed in the trenches for the grade beams.  Here are a few pictures.  If all goes well, it will get inspected by the county inspector and by my engineer today, Friday 5/18, and then concrete will be poured tomorrow.

more foundation progress

We drove over to Gulfport on Saturday 5-12 to look at windows we're thinking about.  They are impact resistant, which means that a 8 foot long 2x4 can hit teh window going 150 mph and the window won;t let any air of water in.  The glass will shatter, but there's a tough membrane inside that holds it together. 

After that we drove to the site and looked at progress.

Visqueen covers the ditches in case of rain

The view looking west toward the water:

The rebar shapes for the concrete.

This is really thick stuff!

We saw this crazed tractor driver, too.

And, of course, the marsh view...

Foundation excavation

After clearing out all the old foundation remnants, and adding some special soil that's called structural fill, we had some rainy days that stopped work.  For the last couple days they've gotten back to work, excavating the ditches that are used to form the grade beams.  The ditches are dug to a specific depth and width and pattern to match the design of the foundation.  Reinforcing steel bars, also known as rebars, are placed into the ditches in a precise manner, again according to the drawings.  Once all the ditches are dug and steel is placed we will have the structural engineer do an inspection, then let the contractor pour concrete.  The result will be a latticework of steel reinforced concrete beams below ground level that will form the base for reinfoced concrete columns that will rise up to support the house.

This view is last week before the digging began:

These views show the perimeter ditches.  More ditches will be dug inside the perimeter to form grid or latticework of grade beams:

We're expecting rain over the weekend, a dry couple days, then more rain, so I'm not hopeful that we'll make alot of progress past getting all the excavation and steel placement.

Sunset over the marsh...

Our contractor snapped this pic one evening last week.  This is part of what we're looking forward to looking at from the porch or boat dock.