The Art of Watering Dirt
Well it’s been a whirlwind of a month and though I’ve thought about blogging many times, the days were just not long enough! So here we go with the latest at Scrub Oak Ranch!
Shortly after the foundation forms came down, we moved right into the the next phase….tarring. Let me just start by saying, this is by far the WORST job ever!!! I had the great vision of being super careful and staying mostly clean, but that is simply impossible. We started by having to pull the heaters out because it was too cold for the tar to stay thinned out. Note: If you get the heaters too close to the tar buckets, they start to boil and smoke! Eek! To add a special treat to the cold weather, it was also crazy windy! This created the tar version of spun sugar flying all over and landing in my hair, on my face and of course everything I was wearing. Yuck! We have quite a few clothing items that were destroyed and will soon line the trash can. SO happy to be done with this phase.
After tarring, we moved to foundation drainage! Thinking this would be a pretty quick phase, we lined up 2 of our nephews to fly in, hoping we’d time their arrival just as we needed to start backfilling. Wrong! The foundation drainage became an incredibly difficult process. Good news, we now had back-up on the way! I don’t think our nephews had any idea what was in store, but they dove headfirst into the project, starting with shoveling dump truck loads of gravel. The first portion of their work week was sunny and hot, resulting in some minor sunburn and then Colorado showed it’s true spring colors, dropping into the teens with pouring snow the next few days. Absolutely cold and miserable! My week was spent experiencing mom life, being a chauffeur, cooking lots of food and doing lots of laundry! We were very grateful for the help and after passing inspection, we all took an afternoon off, went into town and had some amazing and well deserved burgers…that someone OTHER than me made! Haha! At least we sent them home with brag rights that they helped build our house!
Once we recovered from having 2 teenage boys in the house, we tackled the NEXT phase which was the backfill. Definitely could have used the extra muscle for this one. Yikes! Kris’ body may never recover. Using an earth compactor days on end will seriously mess up your body. Since I couldn’t really manage the earth compactor, my job was to water the big dirt pile so it was wet enough for Kris to properly compact. Ummm, yay??? This COULD be an incredibly monotonous task, but if you give me a garden hose in high winds and tell me to water a huge pile of dirt, I’ll find a way to make it interesting! In a very short period of time, my dirt pile became the water feature at the Bellagio in Vegas! The high winds may have blown half the dirt and water in my face, but I had quite the water designs flying and to accompany, me singing Clair De Lune! It was pretty spectacular! Kris’ response to my performance…."whatever does it for ya, honey!” Haha! Oh well, I thought it was extremely entertaining!
This week we had the plumbing roughed-in, Kris is finishing up running the electrical conduit so we can get both inspected, and then we can finish up the backfill! It’s truly looking like a house is about to be built! Very exciting! May should be an even crazier whirlwind! Stay tuned for more, and be sure to check out the latest pictures on our house page!
