Pour it on

There's a new player on the scene: A concrete truck is whirring away on Allison Avenue as I write. A nifty little motorized wheelbarrow of some sort is making trips up and down the driveway, transporting the concrete to the two holes. Steve, Tom and Chad are working to pour a 6" layer of concrete (if I heard them correctly), upon which the footings will rest.

I'm relieved that the big truck didn't need to come on the driveway, and surprisingly excited to see something besides digging going on. It's not anything we'll ever look at once the job is finished, but it means that on the outside of the house, we're done taking things away (porch, bricks, dirt) and have started putting new things in. And that's a good feeling.

For those of you who think this process seems to be taking a long time, it feels that way to us, too. But we're happy with the work that has been done so far. And we hope that things will move more quickly once the foundations are in place.

I really can't wait to see the framing go up so I can begin to see those two spaces. I can't look at a blueprint and think in three dimensions very well. It reminds me of those standardized test questions showing a flattened, irregularly shaped drawing that was supposed to fold up into a geometric shape of some sort. I never could tell exactly what it was supposed to become.

With this project, I'm putting my faith in the people who can look at a piece of paper and envision three dimensions. And I really, really hope they all know what they are doing.