The Foolish Man Built His House Upon the Sand

Well, they finally started building our house. Yay! They dug the hole earlier this week...


And then drilled the pylons into the ground...


Yes, that's right...we ended up getting pylons!!! We got the soil samples from our lot a few weeks ago & the results said that our land is considered "compatible soil." Basically, a combination of clay & silt (sand). This kind of soil is awesome for landscaping purposes, but isn't very good for holding something of significant weight (like a house). A house built on this type of soil will slowly sink & slide over time...hence the famous phrase "the foolish man built his house upon the sand." To prevent any sinking or sliding, our house needs to be built on pylons. I talked about these in a previous post earlier this month if you're not sure what I'm talking about. They ended up giving us 34 pylons around the perimeter of our foundation that are drilled into the ground about 65 feet until they hit granite. It's a very expensive process...it cost the builder almost $40,000. On a side note, I also found out that the church builds all it's new temples on pylons to make them as earthquake-proof as possible. Anyway, we're really excited that we ended up getting them.

We have another meeting with the super this week where they are going to show us drawings of what the landscaping of our lot will look like. As you can probably tell from the pictures, our basement isn't dug down very deep. Because our lot is on a slight slope, part of our basement has to be partially exposed. This is great because it makes your basement very light & bright. But, it can also be bad because it means that a huge part of your foundation is exposed & looks ugly. In order to get away from that, the builder has said that they are going to take the rock & stucco down across that part of the foundation & they are going to build a pretty rock retaining wall across part of our front yard and then build up that part of the lot in order to create a tier and cover up all that cement. We are also going to need a tier or two in our backyard too, so they are drawing up their plans for that as well. I'm excited to see what it will look like. I'll post the drawings when I get them. It is going to be so pretty! I'm so excited to watch it go up! --Lindsay