We have just spent the last two weeks working on the house foundations. First we had to complete the clearing and levelling of the land which took about 2 days. We finished to sort the stones from the old ruin and moved them on the side of the building platform. Then we did the marking of the house’s foundations with the main contractor and started to dig right after using my dad’s back hoe. Luckily we were able to borrow a hydraulic hammer from a family friend that fit onto the back hoe. Without it, we would not have been able to chip away at the rock that we found just underneath the ground surface on the whole upper part of the terrain.

Once all the trenches were dug up and clean of all rocks and lose soil, the main contractor came to pour the concrete. To avoid using too much concrete, we had gone to pick up several trailer loads of stones from a near-by lava rock bed to use in the foundations. We put some stones at the bottom of the trenches and lined the rest of them along the trenches.

As soon as the concrete truck would come and start pouring the concrete into the trench, we would throw as many rocks as we could in the trench. The rocks were submerged in concrete and helped fill the trenches faster and reduce the amount of concrete used. Don’t forget that the house walls are supposed to be 50cm thick with a small section at 70cm around the basement level. This means the foundations ended up being between 70 to 90cm wide and between 50 and 100cm deep depending on whether rock was found during the digging of the trenches or not. Given an approximate 60m-long foundation perimeter, it represents an estimated 36 cubic meter of concrete and stones (or roughly 79 tonnes provided 1m3 concrete = 2.2t).

When we left at the end of our stay, all foundations were poured and we could finally start to see the outline of the house and where it would be on the terrain.

It looked much bigger than what we had imagined but it will certainly change quickly as the walls get built. We cannot wait until the first stone is being put down but this will not be until next Spring.