Catching Up: Digging the Footings

The foundation is underway! In this picture you see a construction worker digging the first hole for the footings. My oldest son Adrian (5 years) loved the backhoe. He really wanted to drive it. It certainly did look like fun -- difficult, but fun!

Catching Up: Staking The Foundation

Now that we've got a well, the builder has the footings staked. When this is done, verified and ready, they can start digging the footings. This leads to the foundation; ours will be a crawlspace. Now we get to talk about one of our first Green choices. We are considering a sealed crawlspace. This allows us to keep moisture out of the crawlspace, but it does more than that. It creates another energy loss barrier and keeps the ducting under the house from losing energy as well.

Catching Up: The Well Is Completed

Since I've just started this blog, it's time to catch up to where we are in the construction schedule. First thing to talk about is the digging of the well. The thing about wells is that despite mankind's amazing technologies, well-digging is still an art full of superstition and just plain luck. Since a well will be our source of water, we were naturally concerned about the flow rate we would end up with (remember what I mentioned about luck?).

Our well is dug and... (drum roll please)... we've got almost 40 gallons per minute! "OK", you say, "so what does that mean?". It means we will have plenty of water for ourselves and our vegetable and herb gardens. Hurray!

Jen's One (and a third) Green Acre

My husband and I have purchased a fine little 1.3 acre lot in Chapel Hill (lot 1 in Blackberry Hollow) and we are going to have a GBI (Green Building Initiative) and Energy Star certified home built there. I will be blogging about the construction progress, including the GBI choices, which ones we selected, and why. I will continually upload new photos of the construction to this blog's embedded slideshow (always available on the right-hand menu under my profile). I'll be talking a lot about building Green, but I'll also be talking about interior design choices, and anything else related to this home-building process that I hope will be of interest.