The front porch project continues through this Labor Day weekend. We are making the most of our extra day this weekend. We have been working hard and have more hard work to complete tomorrow. Although, I think most of the really tedious, annoying work is done.
Saturday and Sunday were mostly spent outside (which has been great, because it's been beautiful!). We have been digging holes 42" deep and filling them with cement. This has been a huge learning experience for me, as I never really knew what a footing was...now I feel like I can build anyone a deck...or at least dig and pour the footings.
Of course we've had the best helper around to keep us on task:
Two complete footings are pictured below. The one on the left was dug today, by hand. The one on the right was dug yesterday with the power auger that digs the hole for you (with a little hard work to hold on to the machine) in about 3 minutes. The power auger may have ended up being more work than it should have been when we got it stuck down in the hole with too much dirt on top...but we learned our lesson. It would have been nice to use the power auger on all the holes, but so many were too close to the house...so manual labor was needed.
Brian digging the last one.
Despite the fact that there are no pictures of it, I did dig my fair share of holes...in fact I think Brian was impressed when I showed him my progress on my first hole and was almost to the depth requirement.
This picture shows our crooked footing. We were digging, found a chunk of cement we couldn't get past and had to move our hole over a bit....but apparently we moved it a bit too much so we had to lean it back to line everything up. This should not compromise the structure.
And again, our special little helper. She did help pour in the three large cups of water each time we needed to mix more concrete.
The huge mess we still have...but will have cleaned up tomorrow.
We have to have the entire mess cleaned up and off the yard tomorrow because we have people coming to treat our lawn again on Wednesday....so we better get the concrete chunks out of their way.
The progress has continued, and we are very excited to get to the actual building stages. Tomorrow we will clean up the concrete chunks, do some painting that will need to be done around the base of the house before the deck gets built and perhaps go purchase all of the building materials to get this party started!
While it's been a lot of hard work, it's been very rewarding. We worked really hard to get the auger back out of the mud hole and my muscles are still crying from it, but it was great to accomplish all this in two days together. We love DIY projects and keep adding more home improvement skills to our resume!
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