A dearth of posts lately, but there is a reason for it I will now bore you with… For those reader(s) who aren’t aware, my lovely wife and I have built a house out in the Virginia countryside (see http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/property/ for wwaaaayyy too much information). We were supposed to move there once the house was finished and pay off all or most of the costs from the sale of our Maryland house (thus allowing me to get a job I actually enjoy, but likely at 1/2 to 1/3 of what I am making now), but economic events overtook and now we too and fro two hours one-way each weekend. I try not to get too upset, I never had any intention of owing two homes and if it wasn’t for the fact that I really really want to be in our country house, I would have tried selling the place years ago. Anyway, because we are basically stuck having to work in the DC metropolitan rat hole in order to afford our two houses (and three mortgages) and my ridiculous pay in the intelligence community allows it, we decided to continue with some construction projects out at the ranch.
Thus, we decided to build a greenhouse/pool (greenhouse for me, pool for my wife). After around a year and a half trying to fit the project within our budget (it underwent some serious changes in design over that period) we got to something we felt we could afford (or rather, something we felt we could pay off in about 4 years, presuming we both stay employed as we are today). We officially broke ground April 2011, but due to various events, controllable or otherwise, have yet to actually get the damn foundation completed. We took the last 5 days off in an attempt to get the footers completed, but the work was too much and instead of pouring all the concrete footers yesterday as I had planned (hoped), we are now looking at pouring this Friday and only doing about half the footers. I sadly underestimated (that should be my epitaph) the amount of effort it would take to prep each footer hole (they all had to have the mud from the recent rains all dug out down to undisturbed earth, doanchano) so we only just finished setting the last form last night as the sun went down (in the freezing wind with temps below 32F). Despite all that work (probably 6 hours a day (can’t do more, when the sun goes down the temps drop like a stone in our little frost pocket)) we didn’t even bother trying to get the footer holes prepped in the pool area, the reason why we have been at this for 9 months, boring through feet of rock, because the sides of the excavation slumped into the holes we so tediously prepared and there was no prayer of being able to get that done in the time allotted. Thus, we will be dividing the footer pour in half and might wind up leaving the pool footers until spring (though I suppose we might be able to devise some sort of retaining wall to keep the sides from filling up the holes).
So, 5 days of back breaking work later, we _still_ haven’t got the damn footers poured and we are now only looking at doing half of them. I have thought many, many times about filling the pit backup with dirt and calling it quits. Just writing this makes me want to do so.
