Saturday, 16 August, we laid cement for the house footings. That's me in the ball cap working on my "leaning on the shovel" technique in case I want to become a professional road worker.

Hard work, but we got it done in five hours.




We had rented a rebar bender/cutter, but realized we would be a little short, so Tom "volunteered" to cut an additional 90 pieces of rebar the hard way.

Did I mention that this simple project of building a house was not enough for this intrepid builder, and I have added a few side projects just to keep it interesting?

I am also building a small music studio on the side of a hill, putting in a 60 foot by 32 foot garden (complete with an underground wired protection from gophers and other subterranean varmints and a fence to keep out the deer and discourage the raccoons, skunks, etc.) and I put in a fence and gate around my daughter's front yard. We are also putting in some fruit trees, and connected to the house project, I needed to build a pad for a 2,600 gallon water tank.

Here is the 10 by 10 pad for the water tank:




Here is the music studio pad. Tom decided he didn't want to grow up to be a cement worker. (For this pad we mixed 36 bags of pre-mix cement by hand and poured by shovel. Lots of great exercise.)