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!