Happy Thanksgiving

Owen brought four pages of what he was thankful for home from school. I think he captures pretty much everything…. Family? Nah….
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Evie doesn’t have a Thanksgiving drawing, but she has a drawing of her Rock Band avatar, Teena.
Teena, Evie's avatar in Rock Band

We have concrete!

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We have been waiting for this day like kids wait anxiously for Christmas Day. It’s been a long three months of hard work—lots of back-breaking concrete demolition, stone removal, crushed stone installation, insulation and radiant heat installation. And today we hired a crew to do the concrete since we didn’t dare mess up the final step. Owen skipped school to watch and Lucas came with Gramps all the way from Pomfret to observe the concrete trucks and the crew at work.

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The pour begins

Radiant down!

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This weekend Sue’s dad helped us lay out the pex. With a single roll of 1,000 feet, we definitely needed two folks to feed out the tubing while Joel used zip ties to hold it onto the wire mesh.

Everything went well, but on Sunday when Sue & Joel were putting on more zip ties and clipping the ends, we found where some of the mesh wore into the tubing. We don’t know whether it’s OK or needs a repair. I guess we’ll find out when we pressurize the system.

Assuming a few odds & ends go OK it looks like we can have the floor poured on Thursday. Can’t wait!

getting there

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Today we traded in shovels for duct tape and scissors. Yesterday we finished compacting the crushed stone and backfilled around the conduit, water and heating pipes. Today we lay down the vapor barrier and began the task of fitting the rigid board insulation. The perimeter of the foundation is all irregular because it is stone so we have to cut to fit. I had high hopes we’d finish and move on to laying out the wire mesh, but we barely finished half of the insulation.

Here’s Evie having a turn with the compactor:

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