Week of December 11, 2006

Work was being done on site this week in preparation for us to begin.

The sewer line was connected to the tap. Our excavator didn't have to go into the alley to make the connection so we saved about thirteen hundred dollars.

Steve Hoy surveying came out again and set our surveying stakes because the machinery for the excavation destroyed the old ones. http://www.hoysurveying.com/ It seems like the excavation machinery including trucks, are really "surveying stake seeking missiles" in disguise.

We made our first trip to site on Thursday and saw the excavation of our basement and we could see that a trace of the original 1917 house. Ray Prendeville gave a very good talk on the history and mission of the Columbus Housing Partnership and we also toured two homes. One home was a rehab across the street and the other was a house almost exactly like ours will be.

On Friday the footers were formed and the concrete was placed in them. Notice the plastic around the footers which is part of our green, high performance building strategy(Nathan Yost of 3-D Building Solutions who is also a consultant to this project http://www.3-d-buildingsolutions.com/projects/default.htm) . Nobody in Columbus has done such a thing. Later we will cut the plastic away from the sides and leave the plastic only on the bottom of the footer. Water can wick up about 1000 feet in concrete and the plastic will help prevent the walls from being moist and help prevent mold. According to Betsy Pettit from The Building Science Corporation who is a consultant to this project, http://www.buildingscience.com/ located in Massachusetts, "Implementing strategies like this is actually about reducing probability." This should make sense to people in construction because managing commercial construction is about managing the probability of risk.

Our building partnership believes that managing that risk should reduce the probability of: being hurt financially by rising energy prices, not being able to afford the aggregate cost of the home over the life of the mortgage, building failures, unhealthy buildings which adversely affect the health of the occupants, and the effect of our consumption on our planet.

Implementing proven, high performance building strategies that are being used in other parts of the country but that are new to an area is both exciting and exhausting. We will keep you informed about those strategies as we progress with the build.

On Friday, we had a very low key groundbreaking. Just great people getting together with a picture or too and no speeches. Many people were at the groundbreaking including former students from a long time ago, city officials, CHP (Columbus Housing Partnership) officials, friends, Green Energy Ohio members, our mentors http://homebaseadults.blogspot.com/ Columbus Green Building Forum members and a lot of others. Tom Wymore and "D" were there from Contract Lumber and Framing and made it a point to work out the some framing details with us and we greatly thank them for that! http://www.contractlumber.com/