Jillian at Shady Grove

Jillian at Shady Grove
Originally uploaded by Matt Hawk in Austin

She can really lounge. Mad skills, yo.

Foundation Repair Week Upon Us

Foundation repair started on my house on Monday. Very exciting times! At least, when you're paying thousands of dollars for something, it helps to get a little excited about it. Thought I'd share a few pics...



Here's the view from where I park the car. Lot's of dirt dug out of the holes around the house.



They had to move the bushes to continue the holes around the front of the house.



Here's what's inside the holes. As you can see, they've sunk a pier and added an end cap.

Next step (tomorrow, I'm thinking) is to jack up the foundation and then put spacers in between the end caps and the foundation to hold everything up good and level. Really looking forward to my doors working again and of course not feeling like the house is sinking around me.

Not too busy to blog though, are we?.....

God I love the web site this is from:

busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest

To be so busy, that you will never finish your job
"There is no way I can finish that too!" "Im busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest!"
busier than a one armed paper hanger busy bee fuck busy busy as a fuck busy

So, yeah. Things are heating up right now, as I'm sure they are for everybody. Jillian started 2nd grade and the boys have started pre-k (trust me, there's pressure associated with pre-k). I just realized that because we've signed the kids up for soccer, we'll be up at friggin Wells Branch soccer fields at 5:30 on Wednesday and 6 on Tuesday and Thursday for practice, not to mention games on Saturday. Works not exactly light for either Cassie and I. Football is back (hallelujah...just means there are games to watch :-) ). What's more, we're entering the high season of family birthdays and holidays. There's a little thing called the San Antonio half-marathon in November that I'm currently training for (although I'm doing Marathon-level distances for training runs). I can already see the rest of 2008 starting to pass in a blur. Oddly enough, I'm not worried about getting all the things I need to get done done. If anything, I'm excited about getting it all. Its been a pretty slow, hot, languorous summer for us and I'm stoked at getting things moving.

One of the things I'm most looking forward to getting going is the repairs of the foundations on our house. Let me back up a bit...it turns out that Austin and specifically the little square of Austin that my house sits on is full of a type of soil called Black Gumbo. "Black Gumbo", is a generic term for highly elastic, clay based soils. That means it grows and shrinks a lot based on water in the soil. Last year we had 2x the normal rain fall all summer whereas this year we have 1/4x. So, I live in a house that's slowly sinking into the ground. Check out what happens....

drywall goodness
cracks in ceiling
yuck

Plus, there's other good symptoms like your doors not wanting to close any more.

At any rate, there's a very strong foundation repair business going because of all this. I'm told there are whole subdivisions in North Austin that will have to be redone as soon as they sort out the class action lawsuit against the builder. Live and learn. Repair consists of pushing a peer down deep in the ground, to the load-bearing-strate no less, and resting the edge of your foundation on that. My house is going to get completely encircled in peers. I'll be staying home and monitoring a little of the work and will post some pics. I might as well since I'm spending 10 grand for this lovely home...err...enhancement! If you have the same type of problems, let me know. I've done a whole bunch of research and can point you away from some options.