We're Baaaaaack!

 If that title makes you salivate for delicious veggies and bread, let me stop you right there. We are not back to growing food for a living. We are back to building another homestead from the ground up.

Let's start with what happened to the original homestead. We sold it and traveled the country in our camper for a summer. That trip ended with my (Jared) first bout with cancer (brain to be specific). I recovered, we moved back to North Dakota, and continued with normal life ... for a while.

We decided we missed living the country life and bought 3 acres a few miles outside of town. We did some dreamin' and schemin' which ended with some house plans. We hired a digger to do what a digger do.

That went well and was of course exciting. We promptly got started forming up the footings using a product called form-a-drain. 

That was going well, until ... we both got diagnosed with different forms of cancer 10 days apart. We put the project on the shelf.

By God's good grace, we are both still here and healthy again. So naturally we wanted to start building again. Except ..... there was a near record-breaking winter in between. Which left us with an 8-foot-deep hole full of snow.

Which turned into a couple feet of water in the spring.

The above photo is after the first melt had dried up giving us enough time to redo the footing forms .... and then the spring rains.

We pumped water, and pumped water. When we were down to mud stage, we did some research on how to dry it up. The answer:

The answer is, you spread 800 pounds of lime by hand and it will dry it up. Also, every muscle you have will be on fire! Then, once you are healed; you, your wife, your father and your nephew bust your collective humps pouring the footings.

For this homestead we opted for a full basement which we stacked up with Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF). The brand we chose is called LiteForm; mostly because we could get them from out local Menards. Stacking them has gone well. It's like legos for adults. The following pictures are where we are at the time of this writing; inspection tomorrow and then schedule a pour.

What you are looking at is my wife in all her grace and balance spray foaming what is known as the 'common seam.' If you are like me and a seam like that makes your skin crawl, let me assure you, it is necessary. If you were to try to act like a brickie and follow the rule of "two over one, one over two", you would be buying a ticket on the struggle bus. We followed the advice of everyone who has ever done ICF, but I can see now that the 'lego' nobs won't line up unless you work from each corner and meet at a seam.

This is yours truly standing on top of the scaffolding I designed in my head and desperately hoped would work. Phew!

The secret ingredient is these roofing fall protection brackets (I call them roof jacks). I had used them previously for their intended purpose of roofing and deduced they would work in this situation.

What's great about this system is that all the lumber will be used to build the next phase of the house. The 2x6's will be walls on top of the treated 2x10's that will be the mud plate on top of our foundation walls.

Here is a gratuitous shot of us lifting a heavy window buck. We got to lift two of them, twice. After we had them in place, we decided they could be a little lower in the wall. We built them based on
this method.

As previously stated, we will be getting the stacked blocks inspected tomorrow and then scheduling a concrete truck and pump truck. Stay tuned!