Foundation and decking

The foundation ins in, the basement walls poured and the main house decking down. YES!!!
As you can see we have had quiet a bit of rain. The foundation is perfectly level because the rain rolled off on all sides equally. The puddles are because we have not put in the posts under the middle bearing beam yet.
Tuesday will be a big day. We are ready to start building the wall. Then next Monday the trusses come.
I spent a lot of time Sunday spraying poison ivy. The lot was neglected and consequently the poison ivy took over. A few sprays of Round Up and it should disappear.

Milestone Progress

Kevin and Max two faithful employees. Drywallers are all finished and now the painters take over.

Kitchen is in all we need now are counter tops.
Painted hallway in on the classroom side.

Footers

The hole for the basement is dug and the footers are going in. Because the ground was so hard we had to hammer drill for every pin that held the footers in place. Here is the finished product ready for basement walls. Nice Concrete out of Duncannon will be pouring the basement walls.
David walking around inspecting. Looking busy.
David and Bob digging around the bulkhead for the basement door. We hit some hard rock. They worked on this for about two hours.

This big area for concrete is for the back covered patio. Instead of forming for the inside walls we are just going to pour the entire area full of concrete.
Dave and Bob still at it. I told them it was rumored there is gold buried in the area and that the people buried it around 11' 11 inches deep.
Ready for concrete. Forms all up and stone in place.
Concrete poured, everything cleaned up, and ready to call it a day.

PS. They never found any gold.

Basement

Here are some pictures of the basement being dug. We are having some perfect weather for this right now. Tomorrow we are setting the footer forms and spreading stone. Friday we are pouring the footers and Monday the walls. We may have to get jackhammers to get the spot to the right in the photo above. It is very hard shale that is running directly toward the hole. This makes it very hard to break apart.

As you can see we will be building on a very firm foundation. You can see a clay vein in the center of the picture below but the rest is very hard shale.

Digging Foundation

Here we are Monday afternoon starting to dig the foundation for the new house. Joe McNaughton is driving the bulldozer. He is stripping off the top soil and piling it up to be redistributed after the foundation is in. This is David Sangree who is apprenticing with us for about a year. (If he is good) We are getting rid of all the scrub pines and brush. We also had to get rid of all the trees and shrubbery around the septic field. David is a volunteer fire fighter with Willow Grove Fire Company. You wouldn't know it by the hard time he had getting this fire started. He brought this dinky fire extinguisher from his car just in case things got out of hand. As you can see from the size of the fire it would not have done much good. It did give us some laughs though.
Here David is getting the septic field ready for sand. All the trees have to be cut down and moved as well as all the brush and leaves. As you can see we are piling up the top soil from the house site next to the septic field so we don't have to move it very far when we go to cover the sand mound with top soil.
Joe moving trees away from the sound mound and prepping the site.
We moved all the good trees a few days ago and David and I were staking them this morning. The site is starting to look good.

Milestone Drywall

Work is progressing at Milestone. Plumbing is roughed in, electric is roughed in and tile is being laid in the entryway and bathrooms.


This is the kitchen and life skills room . The students will learn to cook, do laundry, and general life skills. We will be installing a full kitchen,

This is the conference room. We have an interesting detail in the center, a raised section with some nice lighting.

Here we are finishing the drywall. It's all hung and soon we will be painting.