Foundations and joinery

Things are moving along apace here.  The contractor has made signficant progress on the foundation.

First, it looked like this:

Site leveled with trench started

Then it looked like this:

Trench with rebar ready for concrete

Now it looks like this:

Filling footer trench waiting on plumbing rough in

Hopefully this week the plumber will be in to do the rough-in so that the slab can be poured.  Then it will be ready for the structure.  That brings us to the other major activity going on right now - joinery!  We got started last week and since then we have been working on the posts for the cabin.  They are the most complicated pieces and require the most time to complete, but they are also the main structural members.  There are a total of 79 pieces in the cabin to join.  We are nearing completion of the first post (of 6) and have a good start on a second one.  Here are some visuals to go with the descriptions:

Smoothing the face of the join before laying out the mortise

Cleaning up a mortise after drilling most of the material out

As a bonus, I also planted out most of the grape cuttings.  We aren't going to take time away from the joinery to dig the swales for them this fall, so they will get to overwinter in a garden bed.  I suspect they won't mind. 

Then I thought I would leave you with a picture of what we walked out to on Sunday morning.  This is the view from the front door of the RV looking across the upper field.  Enjoy!

Starting the joinery!

Jeremy completed the first tenon today!  Its a huge milestone for us to finally be starting to put chisel and saw to wood.  More detail and pictures will follow, but wanted to get this beauty captured while the memory is fresh.

Bottom tenon in the first corner post

Quick update - driveway!

We are now the proud owners of a nearly finished driveway!  It arrived just in time for the recent rains and we are tremendously thankful for that.  We would not have made it up the hill otherwise.  No pictures yet (keep forgetting to take any) but we'll have them soon.

We have also restacked the wood in the greenhouse.  It had been arranged in the order that we brought it home which is not the order we will be using it.  We are almost finished with sorting everything by size and getting it re-stacked to start joinery.  We will have our timber framing mentor out early next week to start work, so we need to get this part of the job completed soon.  We ordered some additional tools (hopefully the last of those for a little while) to complete our tool kit and they arrived yesterday.  We're making progress!

Something's happening here...

The contractor came out yesterday and started work on the driveway and foundation!  There's lots left to do, but its nice to see progress.

Future foundation site

Driveway starting to get leveled

Something beautiful

This past weekend we were treated to a flock of barn swallows playing in our locust grove.  They are remarkably beautiful birds and there had to be 100 of them swooping around in the trees.  They flew within a few feet of us repeatedly and generally made our dinner time very special.  I took about a minute of video of them so maybe you can get a feel for what it was like, but it doesn't capture the full effect.  The next day, they were gone.  We must have been a stop on their migration path.  Just thought I'd share...