Leah and I had a plan. We would build a house, and then sell our current house. Simple, right? Of course we didn’t expect the details to be quite so simple. Building a house is a complicated process and, as we are learning, more expensive than we might have anticipated.

We fully expected the sale of our house to be a fairly long process. Rome is not a booming real estate market under the best of circumstances, and selling a house this far from town is not the best of circumstances. Not everyone wants to live up here. A surprise, I know. We didn’t really know how long it might take to sell, but I was expecting months rather than weeks.

And then last week we got a call from a family planning to build a house below us, between our property and neighbor John’s. They had sold their house and rented a nearby house through the real estate broker who handled the sale of my parents’ house and our purchase of the property we are now building on. He told these people that we planned to sell our house, and maybe they should take a look at it.

So, on Sunday, they did. It turns out that the house they have been planning to build looks a lot like ours. They liked what they saw, and left saying that they were going to hold off on seeking more estimates from contractors to build their new house.

They seemed genuinely interested and we all agreed that it would be a good thing for everyone if we could reach an agreement. As of now, we haven’t sold and they haven’t bought. It might not happen. All sorts of things could happen instead. But wouldn’t it be nice?

How’s that for a coincidence?

It seems the best sunsets we see are while driving back home from the grocery store. This was Friday night. It’s the best I could get with my phone from the car.

On the home front, we are now ready to get an inspection of the plumbing that will be beneath the basement slab. The plumber came up last week with a helper to dig the shallow trenches necessary to get the pipes beneath the slab and with the correct slope. Shallow or not, the trench was hard to dig with hand tools. I watched for a while, and then a few days later, had a go at it myself for a smaller pipe to serve as a drain for condensate from the air conditioner and the backflush from the water softener we’ll install. The bottom of the basement excavation lies within the rock layer we hit a few feet beneath the surface. The rock is not particularly hard, but it’s exhausting to dig through it.

We’re having the plumber rough in lines for a bathroom in the basement, but we will almost certainly never finish it. That will be for the next owners. The rest of the lines are drains for the two upstairs bathrooms, the washing machine and the kitchen.

The lines are prepared for inspection by putting in a fairly tall stack at the main drain line, capping all the inlets or outlets, and then filling the lines with water. I brought up about 35 gallons in a tank I filled at our house and we strung a hose between the truck, parked in what will be the garage, and the pipe.

This is a shot I got holding my phone out as far as I could reach over the rear foundation wall, which has not yet been backfilled. It was kind of a stretch.

The sanitary lines are mostly buried. The pipes lying on the ground are the inch-and-a-half lines I’ll put in for the AC and water softener drains. The tank you can see is the same size we’re draining from, but we didn’t use much from it. It’s a lot easier to let a hose carry the water instead of hoisting it up in a five-gallon bucket.

The first filling drained out overnight from a joint in the lines. The plumber came back up the next day and repaired the leak. We refilled the lines and there were no apparent leaks. When I came back up the next day, however, the water had dropped about five feet in the tall stack. There was still no apparent leak. I refilled it, and it has held for two days. I have made the assumption that whatever happened (a tall deer with a long tongue drank it?), it seems to have corrected itself.

I called the inspection department Friday afternoon and arranged for an inspection sometime Monday. I will check the pipe Saturday and Sunday just to make sure, but I think it will be OK. Once we pass this inspection, the next step will be preparation and pouring the basement slab. That is the critical step after which framing can start.

The waterproofing crew came up to our new house on Monday morning. I was thinking of doing it myself, but ultimately decided to let an experienced crew do it because they could complete the work quickly. And it was quick. They were done by mid-afternoon Monday.

The waterproofing consists of a sprayed-on, rubberized membrane. A dimpled plastic panel was adhered to the tacky membrane to provide a path for liquid water to drain down the side of the foundation walls. Here one of the crew is attaching the panels to the top of the sprayed area.

I used a little poetic license for the title of this post. The waterproofing looks like the tar that was rolled on for waterproofing in the past, but it’s really not the same.

A French drain was installed at the base of the foundation wall. It’s different from what I expected. It’s flat, with a rectangular cross section placed on the footing. It may not be strictly necessary, but I might add some standard perforated tubes in the excavated area beside the footing to help drain any water that accumulates there.

A bed of coarse gravel will be dumped in beside the foundation, and then the rest of the opening will be filled with dirt.

Tuesday morning neighbor John met with me and the power company engineer and we decided on where to put the trench for the electrical power supply. Earlier John had rented a trenching attachment for his skid-steer loader.

It didn’t take too long for him and his helper to get a good start.

They’re just about ready to bear over onto the nice stand of winter rye that Sylvester was prowling through in the Friday Felines post. That grass is now history.

The power company requires a minimum depth of two feet. That was mostly fairly easy to achieve, but there were a few large boulders that limited the depth. Fortunately they were in areas where we can fill around the trench to get our required depth.

The power company engineer was a little concerned about digging the trench too far in advance of when they could lay the power cable, but I assured him it was not supposed to rain, and if it did, the trench wouldn’t fill with mud.

I watched John work for a while and then left to get a few groceries. While I was at the grocery store, John texted me a video of heavy rain falling on the mountain. Just as I got back up to our new driveway, John was leaving. He told me that part of the trench had filled with mud and his skid-steer was stuck with about 20 more feet to trench.

It doesn’t look like it here, but John said he can’t get the loader out of the mud. The trencher looks and works like a huge chainsaw designed to cut earth.

We measured about a quarter of an inch of rain, with a little more later in the evening. We got a total of about a third of an inch, not much, but enough to make a pretty good mess of the trench.

I’m not sure how we’re going to handle the silted-in trench, or how John is going to be able to get his loader unstuck. I have a narrow transplanting shovel that will probably just about fit into the trench. If I do any of the shoveling, I’ll probably have to let Leah hose me off before I can even think about coming back inside the house.

Depending on how things go Wednesday morning, the electrician may be able to get the temporary power post up and get an inspection. If that happens, we may be able to get the power company to lay their line in the trench and get power to the construction site this week.