Footings are Fitted!

Guess what kids?

The barren wasteland that was the underneath of our house is undergoing a transformation. You saw us double-checking all of the levels last week in preparation, and now it's slab footing time!

For the uninitiated (which was me), footings are basically little trenches dug between all of our poles into which they will put steel reinforcement and concrete, making a nice solid base for our future slab without using a ton of concrete.

Allie didn't quite know what to make of the process.

Let me just say, that machine operator was pretty amazing! He scraped with the bucket, and the guy in the blue shirt held that big stick that could tell the level of the ground. As a team, they got the dirt beautifully flat.

As you can see! So neat! So tidy!

The next step was the steel reinforcement being laid in each of the little trenches...

And then the concrete arrived!

They did it the sensible way... with a hose and a pump, unlike us!

Unfortunately I didn't get any other shots until the next day, after it rained all night. So the neatness and tidiness was a little affected by the muddy puddles everywhere.

It still looks beautiful to us, though!

Our structural engineer, who is managing this slab-building process for us, paid us a visit on the weekend and explained that we should agree to having concrete blocks laid above the future height of the slab in some areas, where the height of the ground outside was higher, to prevent water from "seepage"-ing into the house (his English is not perfect, so we got a giggle out of his use of the word "seepage" as a verb - we're easily amused).

So the brickies arrived, in all their beer-bellied glory...

And bellies notwithstanding, got to work.

When they had finished and we actually looked at things though, we panicked. Our engineer had assured us that the bricks would line up with the outsides of our poles, so we could simply build the timber house frame on top of them and then put our external wall covering straight on the outside of them in the future (meaning you wouldn't see the blocks at all from the outside in the future). What he didn't mention was that the blocks themselves are about 200mm wide. As in... from outside the house to inside the house, the blocks take up a full 20cm of space, meaning that instead of having normal 90mm walls, we'd probably end up with walls three times that deep (once you factor in the wall coverings inside and outside).

And that panicked us. Because this is going to be a pretty tiny little living space under the house without having absolutely enormous walls eat into it as well!

So we dragged the engineer back out to talk about why on earth these giant blocks were necessary in the first place, and his only real reasoning was because of the height of the earth on the outside. But we don't plan to keep the earth outside the house sitting higher than our slab in the future anyway. Who wants their house to act as a retaining wall if it doesn't have to?! Not us!! Our plan has always been to build retaining walls in the garden, not to have the house itself do the retaining.

The engineer has now agreed to get the blocks knocked off again, and to just give us a normal slab. It's a sad waste, but we're relieved that we caught it when we did, before the slab itself was poured!

So with that landmine side-stepped, the next step in the process is the under-slab plumbing!

A big pile of gravel was delivered...

And the plumber did his thing. Ahh plumbing. Isn't it lovely?

The plumbing went in without a hitch, thankfully.

But then all hell broke loose.

I was upstairs working in my office, and I heard the call of "Bec!" from Tom, with that note of fear and urgency in it that made me drop my mouse and dash downstairs at top speed.

Tom, in trying to dig out around our water pipe to prepare it to be moved outside of the concrete danger zone, hit a gas pipe! Gas wasn't connected to anything in the house at all when we bought the place, nor is there a meter connected to this pipe (and the coating around it was rusty and brittle and falling away), so we're pleading innocence here. Which wasn't much consolation with the smell of gas filling our nostrils.

I made a frantic phonecall to the emergency line, and they promised to send someone out.

In the meantime, Tom thankfully managed to close off the flow of the gas with some duct tape so we didn't faint from the fumes. And then the gas guys turned up not long after (great service!)!

We were very grateful for their prompt arrival.

But I was ready to promise them my firstborn when they agreed to not just fix the gas pipe where it was broken (on the slab side of those blocks - which is the wrong side, since it will be filled with concrete soon), but to cut it off and fix it a bit further along, on the outside of the blocks, safely out of the way of our future concrete.

Hallelujah! Who knew I'd be so glad to see a yellow and black pipe in a muddy hole! But if that muddy hole is out of harm's (i.e. concrete's) way and ready for a new gas meter to be attached (which we can then use to connect our currently-running-on-a-BBQ-gas-cylinder kitchen stove to), it's the most beautiful thing I've seen for a while!

So there ends Chapter 1 of our slab-building story. Let's hope Chapter 2 is less eventful!