Foundation construction

The foundation is now under construction. The footer has been poured, and the foundation walls are starting to go up. It's exciting, because we can finally start to see the size and shape of the house itself:

From Framing the foundation

This picture and the next one are from when the footer was still being framed. Brie and Kael are standing in one of the kid's bedrooms. The open space on the left with the plywood stacked in the middle is the basement rec room, with the kitchen in about the same place one floor up. The garage is in the upper right.

It looks like the rec room view might not be as bad as I worried in the last post, but it's still not great. Here's Brie and Kael standing where the basement patio will be:

From Framing the foundation

The camera is inside the rec room, and the framing in front of them corresponds to the rec room wall, which will have the room's only window. The floor level will be a couple feet up, so that wall won't be quite as imposing. There will be a roof overhead, though (extending out to the framing behind them), so it's going to be a pretty enclosed, dark space. We'll probably grow some ivy or something to make the wall a little more attractive (masonry is also an option, but probably not worth the cost). The basement is mainly for the kids anyway, and hopefully they won't mind. The basement bedrooms both have windows on the downhill side (with no wall in the side), so they should be OK. The good news is we're saving quite a bit of money by not installing the rockeries that would have made this view more attractive: so much in fact that we're coming out about even, despite all the extra cost of dealing with the soil problems.

We considered not backfilling the space between the retaining wall and the uphill wall of the house, as seen here:

From Foundation wall framing

The unfilled space would have been behind the plywood framing, which marks the future foundation wall; the area in the foreground is the patio, which wouldn't have been filled in any event. We thought we could have saved money that way by not doing the backfilling, and building that back wall as an exterior wall rather than a foundation wall, but it turns out that would have required redoing the structural engineering, and it would have cost as much to truck out and dump the excess soil as it would cost to fill in that space, so we're sticking with the original plan.