Thursday, September 30, 2010

the wise man and his foundation

[*whoops, this post is almost a week old. enjoy anyway!]

might not be me! or so i was a wee-bit worried. the next phase of the house was to put long slats of cement in that bridge the mysterious hollow foundation shown in the previous post. These slats are 35cm wide and 2-4 m long. พ่อ has been incredible about finding ways to reduce the price at every phase through some new method. We went to the factory where these are made and bought a bunch of the recalled ones that have slight bows or cracks.

At first I was worried because our house growing up had a cracked foundation (or I guess has... they don't usually heal so well), and every season, the swelling ground creates fun for my dad to reapply mud above a major supporting beam that cracks away from the ceiling. I asked พ่อ about this and he shrugged and said, "no problem." Because of the remaining language barrier, I always have to be patient and see what he really has planned later. Turns out the plan was to cut off the pieces into 3m sections when the cracks were within 1/4th and some pieces were just chipped at the ends so we cut them into 2 pieces to use where we needed 2m pieces.

Then, here's the real kicker, tomorrow we are laying a wired grid down on top of all of these beasts and putting a 3.5 cm thick layer of cement on top of it. Needless to say, cracks or no cracks, the end result is going to be solid! its pretty crazy to be walking on the floor after having been confined to the same muddy terrain for 2 months. Were moving upwards. Let the floods come! We've got sand, cement, rock, and steel for our foundation. Oh, and i almost forgot, i had พ่อ put in two steel hooks into the pillars on the porch for prime time hammocking.

Thats right, we're gonna have two sleepable couches in the front room, and a hammock that can manage 2 peoples in front and plenty more floor space. And, if need be, a ginormous house next door with the two friendliest people ever, our Thai parents! I really outdid myself this time. Hope the pictures make up for my rambling.

editor elyssa's note: i tried to make the above more readable, but i don't know how successful i was. nick's legibility is minimal when he's excited about a project. my apologies. at least he's really cute.

[*i can't find the camera to upload the pictures, so those will be in the next post, which will also feature our newly finished FLOOR ; ) until then, here's a picture from our honeymoon almost 2 years ago. just because.]


and yes, that is a nativity. it's hard to be reverent sometimes.

1 comment:

Morgan said...

love the honey moon flash back :-)! And hooray for your floor- "solid as a rock". Yipee!!!!