My foundation is done! My foundation is half-way done.

In the past couple weeks, I've finished off the major foundation work of the season. That means that the house is now firmly attached to a foundation which includes LOTS of concrete. Bring on the earthquakes!

No cause for celebration though, since this effort only brings a total of one-half of the house up to snuff with a real foundation. The east half of the house is still rather jimmied with wood posts sitting on rotting bricks, rotting concrete and rotting wood sleepers. All that will be much easier than the work done to date since only very minor excavation will be needed. In all, I removed 39 yards of dirt from my basement to accommodate the final foundation. The picture above is me driving the Bobcat MT 52. It's called a "walk-behind skid steer" and is basically a power wheelbarrow. Great for scooping and driving, I used it for about 38 yards. You can move about 10 yards of piled dirt in a couple hours with this machine.

To get the Bobcat in and out of the basement, I had to remove the deck and porch, and dig myself a ramp from the back yard into the basement. Now that the foundation is done, I've got the ramp all back-filled with gravel (again moved with the Bobcat). That MT 52 is so handy that if I had a spare $10k laying around, I'd hunt down a used one. The only problem is that it is reeeeeally heavy, so it ends up tearing up the yard pretty severely. Now I've got a giant mud pit for a yard. The new replacement deck will cover all that up.