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Friday, 19 October 2007
Let the Digging Begin!
We were pleased with how quickly the Town of Sackville responded
when we began the paperwork to get sewer and water hookups, and
the driveway culvert in place. We consulted with the Town Engineer
to select where each would be located, and within a couple of days
the job was done. I was especially impressed with the neat way
that they built up the slices of shale to support the edges of
driveway over the culvert.
We then began to search for someone to begin excavations, to prepare
the driveway and pad (sturdy stone base) for our new home.
One of the key principles of our solar home project has been to
work with local people. This not only supports the local economy,
it also encourages local tradespeople to expand their skills and
experiences by being involved in our solar home project. These
new skills are then available to others in our community, so that
there is an even greater local benefit. We would like to encourage
and support others to become involved in building solar homes,
not only for the ultimate savings in heating costs, but also to
reduce the production of greenhouse gases by traditional methods
of heating homes. This is good for our community, and good for
our world.
There were only a few different local companies to choose from,
when it came to finding people to do the earth-moving work of our
project.
We needed to find a company to remove the topsoil along the curved
route of our driveway, to cover that route with shale, to remove
topsoil down to the hardpan where our house would be sited, and
to put a layer of shale on that too. This had to be done before
the winter, because we needed to let the stone settle for several
months before house construction. Additionally, we needed to address
the water issues on the lot, by ensuring that ditches were located
to direct any water runoff away from the house.
I began to phone around, to ask for estimates on these tasks. And
then I phoned around again. Every week I would phone around, leave
messages, and await returned calls. I understood that everyone
was busy, but surely they had time to at least give me a rough
estimate! Didn't they need the work?
Finally, after more than a month, I asked Eric to make the phone
calls. His calls were returned within an hour.
I could be diverted at this point, to share some of my other experiences
as a woman, with various other tradespeople such as mechanics,
appliance-repairmen and the like… but I won’t.
We got two
estimates for the work (both of which were similarly priced, but
one of which offered us some sensible new ideas for
water management), and we selected one. They got busy on our driveway,
and then the rains came. And it rained and rained and rained. What
was supposed to be a one-week task took 2 months to complete because
our land was so soggy that we could not get heavy equipment onto
it most of the time. It's a good thing that our plans included
a winter hiatus, otherwise we could have been quite frustrated.
Finally, the base for the driveway and pad were completed, and
land had been contoured and ditched to run water away from the
pad. We would let gravity and other natural forces do their work
over the winter, while we attended to other things.
By the time the snow was flying in November, we could drive our
car down our winding driveway (apparently, Feng Shui recommends
2 curves in a driveway - our 2 curves are a happy accident!), park
next to the shale pad where the house would be, and begin to get
a sense of what it would mean to eventually live there. We could
feel the prevailing winds, once again identify the slopes of the
land beneath the browned, flattened grasses, and look forward to
the melt and trickles of spring, several months away.
Next time: Inspiring home designing
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