Cabin Build: Stepping It UP!

Since the cabin site is on a sloped mountain side, we need to include steps in the form-work for the footers. There was also some bedrock impeding our trenching efforts. We had to work around this. We were not going to get any cement poured this weekend, but wanted to make a lot of progress on the form-work to finish the cement pour before the winter sets in. The race is on!

Here is one big step. Lots of digging, leveling and filling!

Here is the other side and working on two-steps.

Cabin Build: Cement Pour Part 1

Recall the Big Dig post from last fall? Well, our team of cabin builders assembled this particular weekend to start the cement pour. Andy had scheduled a delivery of supplies to be delivered at an undisclosed staging location near his land. The delivery was "supposed" to occur between 7AM and noon on Saturday morning. Hmmmm? This sounds like a cable guy appointment......yeah, "we'll be there between 12 and 3"....and they NEVER show up! Lets see how all this turned out!

We arrived the Friday night before to start work on clearing the trenches that we dug during the Big Dig. We did not realize (I don't think) how much MORE work we had to do. So we re-surveyed and squared up the cabin site. We had a generator and lights so that we could work through the night.

We traded several phone calls with the people in charge of delivering the 150 bags of cement mix, lumbers and rebar. Finally they told us they would be there a little after noon. We watched the sunlight move across God's canvas of fall colors as we waited. This place is heaven!

Finally the delivery arrived around 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. We lost a lot of time during The Big Wait but tried to stay busy to quickly get the form-work in place for the cement pour.

Andy picked up a good mountain pick up truck with some lift and big tires to transport the building materials to the cabin site. I had misplaced my pouch of Red Man Chewing Tobacco, but really felt that I needed it now! It takes a good sturdy 4-wheel drive to traverse the old logging road beds and deliver the materials to their final destination.

Night sat in and it was getting cold, so we started a nice camp fire and then resumed work. We would not actually start pouring the cement until Sunday......I'm glad that I had requested Monday off work.....I kind of figured something like this would happen.

Early Sunday morning we had breakfast and coffee and got an early start. The form work proved to be much more confusing than expected, but finally we took the time to go through the dimensions and we got it right. Eriks is the brains behind all the planning and work.

Before the forms were in place there was still a lot of leveling to do and some bedrock to punch through. I was on my knees digging with my fingers to help get the form-work level.

Late Sunday we started pouring and we finished around 9 PM. We had to finish the lower section of the footers. We would have to come back and finish the rest at a later date when we could all get together again. Hopefully we would before the winter sets in.

Monday....the morning after. The coffee is hot and the cement is hard. Wow....my first cement job and my smoothing looks pretty good!

In a couple weeks we would come back to first finish the form work for the top part of the cabin site.

le minor de E and yo maja le G

I put in some guitar time this morning to clear my mind. Here we have a acoustic doodle in and about the notes within the key of E minor / G major....the same notes really....just so many creative ways to get around the fret board....adding a few triads here and there. Yes, I know the video is dark. The original always looks brighter. Oops!

Diminishing your E minor scales

Here we are combining the E minor standard scale with the E harmonic minor scale, or the D# diminished. I use interchangeably scales that root from the E minor to F# diminished, G major to G diminished, and D major 5th to D# diminished. Sounds pretty cool huh?