Backfill
Besides the construction of our new home, we have decided to move to the island sooner than expected. The travel back and forth from Bellevue is a bit time consuming. We rented a house, not too far from our house project on the island, and will be moving within the next few weeks. Another reason for moving is school. Online school is getting old, having the opportunity to start in person schooling for our 2nd grader and 4th grander is another great reason to start the island life.
Early morning commute to Orcas Island.
Filling up the hole! Now that we got our foundation mostly complete, we need to back fill our hole so that we can pour concrete floors. We had a lot of material to move, about 800 yards was a guesstimate, so we brought in some heavy equipment. We contracted a Loop Belt truck from our friends at Western Concrete Pumping in Bellingham WA. With our combined forces we were able to fill up the hole in two days, with 17 people on the job to get it done.
After our backfill of crushed rock, we added a layer of drain rock on top and capped that with sand. The sand makes for a nice bed to lay our foam insulation on. Before we pour our concrete floors we install our radiant heat tubing. We will have heated concrete floors throughout our new home. There is a labrith of red tubing!
Our crew this week brought their lunch game to a new level, camp stove onsite and tacos daily. We love tacos, especially when working outside in the cold. Thanks guys!
Evan has been in the field daily working with the crews on the back fill and concrete slab prep. Doing some physical work is very satisfying and seeing the results of our labors in action is awesome!
The main Crew Members
We are installing radiant concrete heated floors, so we have to insulate under our concrete slab to keep the heat coming up into our home. In the pictures, you can see the white foam insulation everywhere under and around our concrete floors, and also you can see the red pex tubing which will carry the warm water that will heat our feet!
