End of Week 7

Week 7 brought us closer to getting out of the ground. The under floor plumbing is going in and the floor joists are being installed. The dirt is being put back on the outer parameters of the house so soon all the concrete foundation forms will be buried and invisible. All the work from the past 2 months will be like it was never there to the naked eye...

A small spice rack as an exercise in woodworking.

To practice the finer details of woodworking and get exposure to using more tools, I built a small spice rack. This is a pretty common woodworking learning project. The wood is a Walnut and for the finish I just used gel-polyurethane. Honestly, I have no idea what I would use this for in the house...

As for the heart, well, it was to practice using the scroll saw so I needed do to something with curves...

End of Week 6: Concrete have been poured.

The concrete part of the foundation is finally complete. What remains is to pack the dirt on the inside and layout the gravel so that we can start on the floor joists and under-floor plumbing. We're running about 1/2 week behind schedule.

End of Week 5: Foundation blocks

With the support piers poured, the next phase is to do the concrete forms and inserting some materials that deals with expansion and compression of the soil. The plywood is to hold the concrete when it is poured.





From the first picture, the layout of the house becomes clearer.

This is the picture of what's between the plywood:



At the bottom is the cardboard like things that will deal with the expansion/compression. Once the concrete is poured, we'll never see those things again even though they cost me an arm and a leg...

End of Week 4: Starting Foundation Form

The crew has been working hard to get the foundation ready for next week's pouring. The pillars have been poured already so those 10-17' holes from last week are all filled.



The plywood that is there is along the outer wall of the house and the floor will be about 4" above it.

There were some serious mud that gushed up as the pillar were drilled:

Week 3: Continuing to prepare the foundation

Week 3 is more drilling for the foundation piers. At 7', we hit water which means more $$$. :-(

Picture of one of the holes:



You can see that the bottom has a bit of water:



The metal rods that will be put into the expensive holes we're digging:

End of Week 2: Preparing for piers

The ground in the area is what our general contractor refer to as "glop". Basically, it's pretty much clay in the ground which is why they required us to put in a pier foundation which is really expensive and ate a big chunk of our budget. This week has been preparing to put in the piers.

Big 'ol drill bit:



The drilling machine:



Property with trenches with marks of where the piers go:



Obviously, the general contractor is already using my office porch for himself!

Do Engineers Want to Be Lawyers?

We engineers tend to be well educated and often very confident in our own abilities in and outside of our area of expertise. We often straddle the fine line between confidence and arrogance. How often have we rolled our eyes at lawyers and judges requesting our source code thinking, "Do they really think that they can just pick it up, read it and understand?"

Computer source code is very precise. It has to be so that a computer can process it and do exactly what we instruct it to do. "a = 1" is precisely what it says. This should make computer code easier to understand then the english language which requires a lot of context. "It's cool" -- what does that mean?!? Those of us in software engineering know that code is not necessarily easy to read or understand because even if the language is precise the meaning can still be difficult to decipher.

Just like programming languages in software engineering, Legal and Politics have their own language. Legal language is especially difficult because even though it uses English its structure and sentences have a precision that doesn't necessarily match that of common vernacular.

Just like how we know that a lawyer can't just start an text editor, read the code and be able to understand, how come we feel that we can read proposals and half researched news articles and declare ourselves as experts?

Outline taking shape

The rough outline of the foundation is taking shape so we should be able to drill the piers soon. Now I'm actually able to stand there and get a better feel for the dimensions of the house rather then just looking at plans on a piece of paper.

Garage workspace

Here are my last 3 projects and resulting in my new garage work space.