Day 3

This post was imported from a blog called Contemporation where Amy and I wrote about the renovation of our 80’s contemporary home in Atlanta. That blog is no more but I wanted the content to live on.

As promised, things look quite a bit different around here than they did in my post from Wednesday. Ok, well, from the bottom of the driveway, it actually kinda looks the same except that they moved the porta-potty to the side of the driveway. I guess that’s an improvement.

All the blocks that were holding back that dirt around the driveway were moved to the narrow space on the right side of the house. We’re planning to recycle these as a retaining wall along the road and left side of the driveway which is currently made of crumbling railroad ties.

Next up, I present to you what will soon be our new, single-car garage. After moving the old blocks, they dug back almost to the property line on the left side of the house and several feet back toward the deck.

Once they made it far enough back, the footing contractors dug a trench in the rock-hard Georgia clay for the footing and ran 3 pieces of steel rebar along the entire L-shaped run this morning. By noon, we got the news that we passed the footing inspection and that they’ll be able to start pouring first thing next week.

And what did they do with all the dirt they moved? Currently, it’s sitting in front of our house. Our general contractor says we’ll need about half of it to use as backfill around the new, poured wall for the garage but we’re going to put out a “free dirt” sign next week and try to give the rest away.

While I plan to continue posting photo updates like this every few days, I thought it might be interesting to create a video of the construction process as well. The idea was inspired by a timelapse video that Mike Davidson created of the construction of his own (absolutely amazing) home in Seattle. To create our video, we decided to order a Wingscapes TimelapseCam for about a hundred bucks and mounted it to one of the dogwoods in the front yard.

Originally, I had it set to store an image every 30 minutes from 7am – 7pm, but after reviewing Mike’s configuration, I’m planning to bump that up to every 10 minutes. It should make for a pretty cool video once the project is done.