Author Archives: Nina Macdonald

April 17, Interlude: Flowers

Although Ted has  a flower bed in one of the raised beds in the front yard, and we have native plants that flower in fairly unshowy ways in the terrace beds adjoining the staircase up to our house pad (37 steps), we also have geraniums lining the staircase, vetch covering most of the orchard by […]

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Monday, April 16, 2018

The big machine arrived this morning.  You could hear it chugging up the canyon for quite a while.  It was preceded by 2 flagmen walking backwards in front of it. It did not have an easy time of it, having only dug out two of the deep caisson holes, but they started with the hardest […]

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Thursday, Friday, April 12-13

Well, I have finally put in an alarm on my phone to remind me to write the blog. Last Thursday they started putting more rebar into the house foundation wall. Then on Friday, they added even more.  They’re taken from different angles, unfortunately. On Friday, they also started adding rebar to the garage foundation. A […]

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Well, I haven’t been writing because nothing was going on, but because what they were trying to do wasn’t working very well.  They started trying to drill the caissons last week with the backhoe with an auger, and it just couldn’t handle the big rocks it ran into. The contractor has found someone else with […]

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Thursday, April 5, 2018

Still no caissons.  They dug out the area up top right behind the garage, where our 10,000 gallon water bladder will go. We are getting it from http://tufftechbags.com/largertanks.htm. 

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Wednesday, April 4, 2018

I was confused about what they were doing on Wednesday.  They were digging out the foundation for the garage before they dig the caissons.  So just some work with the backhoe. The blueish cement you can see in the picture is the old garage floor, which has a blue epoxy coating on it. The new […]

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Tuesday, April 3rd

The surveyors came yesterday and planted flags for all the caissons for the house and garage foundations.  Some for the garage were right in the middle of two oak trees.  We met with the contractor this morning and he called the structural engineer to talk over how to change the underpinnings so we wouldn’t destroy […]

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Friday, March 30, 2018

The demo people came on Wednesday and removed most of the rock from the house site and took it up to the rock pile up the hill, but their bobcat broke down again and they had to stop.  They came back today and finished the job. This was necessary because the surveyor is coming on […]

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Not much to happen this coming week

Tomorrow morning, Ted is meeting the contractor at the County to pull the house and garage permits. We were not allowed to pull them until after the grading was approved. Two weeks ago when the house permit had finally passed all its hurdles, we discovered that the Fire Authority had requested an additional line on […]

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Wednesday, March 21st

It rained quite a bit over the weekend while I was in NC at my Father’s 95th birthday party. The grading inspector came on Monday and approved the house and garage grading.  Ted and the contractor are now allowed to go pull the building permits for the house and garage, but it is going to […]

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