Construction – Foundation nearly finished

5 days, 40 workers, 250 tons of stone, 30 bags of cement, 60 tons of sand and 20 tons of gravel, and we are nearly there…

	Emmy and Cheryl walking out on the nearly finished foundation walls; they are standing where the living area meets the valley porch
	The valley side porch is going to get some nice sunset views.

Construction – Foundation Continues

Some more images of the foundation underway – please excuse the dodgy mobile phone snaps.

	We are trying, as much as possible to source our materials locally, luckily there is a quarry just down the valley because we’re at 200 tones of stone and counting.
	At the end of the second full day of stone laying, the outer foundation walls are up to full height.
	The front wall looks higher than we expected ( in the rush to get started a more detailed survey was never done ) but as you can see, there will be some nice views from up there.

Construction – Preparing the Site

After negotiating with two master masons that were recommended by our friend, it was decided that we should start immediately, in order to give ourselves the best possible chance of finishing before the rains.

In less than a day the site was cleared and smoothed.

Inspecting the weathering on the big sample, which has been through a few really heavy rainstorms in the past week. In the closeup of the big sample you can see that the only damage from from a week in the rain is from people digging at it with their keys.

A successful first day at the site

Construction – Foundation begins

The foundations are done in the local style; stone and cement walls set into trenches under all load bearing walls, then packed earth and small stones in between to form the a base for the cement floors.  The walls are marked out with timber frames and string, then the trenches dug down into the firm subsoil – no frost lines to worry about here.  The downhill side of the foundation is dug a full meter into the subsoil to hold the house firmly in place.