Foundation for our Straw Bale Home

Wow y'all! I have not been keeping up with sharing all of the work we've been doing on the Straw Bale build. Things are busssssy, but I'm making an effort to document some of this to share/educate/enliven and because I value being able to look back on things.

The month of June included a lot of work on the foundation. You saw us get a backhoe in to dig and fill the trench. And I didn't record any of the form building, though @birdsinparadise documented some of it when they visited.

It was so awesome that they could come & help us with the foundation -- and my mom helped clean and organize our entire outdoor kitchen (who's amazing? she is!!) Not only were we making great memories together and we'll always remember them as being a part of the house build, but they're really brilliant and skilled people. They used to own a home building company and my dad spent many hours on site (+ he's a perfectionist who can build nearly anything!) and my mom was the accountant for said home building company and did all of the estimating for the builds... perfect duo to step in as we're wrapping our minds around the build.

As I mentioned above, my dad is a perfectionist "over-builder" and that's exactly what we wanted while making the foundation. In fact, we had a friend of ours who had worked in concrete for 8 years come over and inspect the forms before the concrete & pump trucks came Friday June 28, 2019, and he was impressed with the forms saying that they were overbuilt. The pump truck operator said the same thing! We had no blowouts and everything went smoothly (except Ini misestimated the amount of concrete to have delivered so we had to hand mix a section.) All in all - it went really well.

Here are some pics from the day:

We had to get a pump truck as the cement truck couldn't fit around our site. We couldn't believe how large the pump truck was - absolutely incredible! When it got going the work happened so quickly!
Ini directing the nozzle into the forms.

We had a good crew of local friends including Petey & Sumner from Eastwind (an income sharing community near us), Chris & Gene (neighbors from 10 min away), Michelle (neighbor 20 min away) and Sarah (a friend we recently met at the Baker Creek Festival who is 3 weeks away from having a baby!). It was a great crew!
Petey & Sumner banging the sides of forms to get the air bubbles out of the concrete.

Gene especially had a lot of concrete experience under his belt and he and Chris smoothed off the tops as we went along.
The little section to Chris' right was the gap between our need and what Ini estimated! Some of the trench was deeper than he thought it would be and that's why he thinks his estimate was off (even though he ordered more than he thought we'd need.)
We eeked out the last bits in the pump truck (that the pump can't access) and filled up the trench by hand, but it still wasn't enough. Ini, Petey and Sumner mixed some concrete by hand after Michelle and I went to town to get some. Not ideal, but it worked!

Today Ini is taking off the forms (we've been lightly misting it for the past day and a half). It's been super hot - like in the 90s so that concrete is drying and curing quickly. So far what he's taken off looks great!

I have a video of the process that I'll compile and upload as well and we'll do our best to blog about the process as it unfolds.

It feels like such a big hurdle to be finished with the foundation. This was a new step for us and a lot of the steps to come are things we've done before. We'll be calling the community in for help along the way and we're super excited to be finished with the foundation! Onward <3

---

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.ozarkmountainjewel.com/2019/06/30/foundation-for-our-straw-bale-home/

---