Our Hillbilly Home - Breaking Ground

This story is about how we got started with our farm several years ago...I was chatting with a friend one day and talking about how we got our house, and she wanted to see some photos so I decided to write the story for my blog and share photos instead of trying to e-mail a bunch to her. If you missed the first part of this story, you can find the links to all the parts on my links page.
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Once we knew we had the house, we talked to the mover and got a date when he could do the moving. It happened to be the week of Thanksgiving 2003 which meant we had to get two sides of the foundation up (the house mover wanted to back the house through the foundation and set it on it...this would save us money and make it easier for them. So we only did the two long sides, with a little coming out from them so it was sturdy and the corners were done) and a few things done on the house, before it was ready to move and we only had a month to do it in! *gasp*

We also had to keep working at our business...as windows that need work just won't wait and we couldn't afford to loose any window companies.

After talking to a couple people who did foundations and discovering they didn't have time to do it in that month we decided we had no choice...it would have to be done by us, even though we'd never done a block wall before.

We decided to talk to my Dad, and see if there was any way he could help us out since we knew the time was going to run out way to quickly, and he said he could come help and ended up making several trips back and forth that month to help get everything ready so we could be ready to move the house in. Praise God for my Dad, he made the difference and we were able to get everything done in that months time.

The first order of business was to have someone come dig a hole, since we were putting the house on the side of a hill. We couldn't afford to put the house on a full basement (which would have been really NICE) so we just had them dig a hole so we would have a crawl space. Unfortunately it ended up being a bit further down the hill than we would have liked but the guy running the track hoe didn't listen real well. It worked, just not exactly how we would have liked it.


We actually have a big bank to the east of our house, because it wasn't done like we wanted...but hopefully we can eventually afford to make that work for us by putting a root cellar into the bank, although I doubt it will be too soon (if ever).

We also hired the same guys to put in a septic tank & lateral field...thankfully that was something we didn't have to be around for since we needed to go do some warranty work, so we could afford to pay for all this. LOL (That's also why I don't have photos of them working on that part of our project. LOL)

Stay tuned for pouring the footings...

...next time on "Our Hillbilly Home".
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More will come once I get the photos gathered, and words written...please forgive the fact that I'm clearly NOT a "writer" AND the time it could take for the next part to show up...a day, a week, a month or... God forbid... a year.
Next installment is here.