We took the first concrete step in our house construction Wednesday – we had the footings poured. This is the first time anything has actually been constructed, as opposed to removed.

I watched the crew putting the forms in place Tuesday. Neighbor John was there part of the time. He said his dozer operator had a close call earlier on the mountainous pile of dirt at the corner of the house site. If you look carefully, you might be able to see where the tracks lead off towards the house site from the path he wore up and down the slope. That’s where he came close to turning the dozer over.

But all turned out OK.

We’re going to have a sound foundation for our house. Often in this part of the country, footings can be formed by simply digging a nice, square trench in the ground. In our case, however, the footing forms had to be built from two-by-fours held in place with stakes and rebar. Getting the rebar into the ground required using a power drill. The surface was too hard to drive a piece of rebar into the ground with a small sledge.

Notice that the guy with the drill is wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a cloth around his neck. This was not because it was cold. The temperature was in the 80s. But this worker, who has been with this crew for about 15 years, knows how to dress for bright, sunny weather. (Once when I was visiting a friend in New Mexico, he told me that in the summer you can tell the tourists from the natives because the tourists are the ones wearing short-sleeved shirts.)

The footing crew finished their forms Tuesday and arranged the footing inspection for Wednesday morning. We passed, so the pour started around 1 pm.

Here’s the overall scene as the pour progressed.

I made this image using our new camera’s panorama function, all done in the camera. I was standing on top of the dirt mountain. This shot shows the entire foundation, including basement and garage.

There is a large step up from the basement level to the garage level in the corner. That’s where the pour started.

The footing guy ordered dry, or stiff mix because the concrete had to stay within the tall form in the corner and not run out at the bottom. That made it a little hard to get out of the mixer at first.

This is the next-to-the-last corner of the footing, leading up to the front of the house.

The crew had just finished the first six yards of concrete and had the second truck pull up to start dumping the next load. I’m guessing that the first six yards did about two thirds of the total footing.

The next step is have the foundation wall forms set up, and then get the next concrete pour. I’m not sure when that will happen, but before that happens I expect to have found all the materials necessary to waterproof the walls. I hope there will be some progress on at least arranging the framing by that time, too.

A week ago today, while we were on our way home from Denver, neighbor John began the excavation for our new house. He texted us a video of a backhoe bucket scraping the rock that underlies the entire cleared area. It was not encouraging. But then he included a picture of the excavation they finally managed. He said we got lucky – no blasting required.

This is what I found Tuesday when I went to look at the site.

That big pile is topsoil and broken-up, sandy rock. Some will be used to fill around the foundation walls. We hope to save all the topsoil for use around the site. I think it will be good planting soil

Later, John and his helper were removing topsoil from the garage area.

This is back of the excavation, where the back of the basement will be with the top at about the level of the main floor.

The dark red is topsoil. Everything else is rock. The topsoil can be removed easily, but the rest is more trouble, especially with the dozer John and his helper are using.

As you can see, the rocks are layered fairly uniformly. It surprised me that they uncovered no large boulders like the ones I found everywhere in the area I had excavated for our current house. Everything at the new lot seems to have broken up into sand and small rocks.

Today the entire basement area is excavated. The garage grading behind the house is mostly done, but there is more rock that has to be broken up before it can be removed. John plans to have a large backhoe brought in on Wednesday to finish that part of the excavation.

Once all grading is done, the next step will be pouring footings and foundation walls. I hope that happens within a couple of weeks, but with construction, it’s hard to know for sure.