Do It Yourself Cabins

The foundation bricks are about to be completed.

After a long break due to thunderstorms and rain, we finally started to lay the foundation bricks. We’re using cinder blocks and Quikrete Mason Mix. We’re starting on the lowest step and then will start to build up our corners.

After a week of letting the concrete cure it was time to remove the form boards. It had rained during the week and the bottom of the trench was full of water. This made pulling the form boards difficult since the stake holes would pull a vacuum every time we pulled up a stake, but with enough hammering we got everything removed.

The big day, we had to pour about 150 bags of concrete for the footing since getting a concrete truck to the site was not an option. We started about 7am and it was a very long day. One of the mixers wasn’t working too well, so we only used one mixer and did some mixing by hand. Everything went as expected, it was a lot of work, but we finished up about 4pm.

We had three pallets of concrete delivered from Home Depot on Friday. We didn’t think they would be able to get to the build site to drop off the concrete, so we had planned on using this weekend to move everything up the hill with a truck.

Lucky for us, the delivery truck had a relatively small forklift that fit through the trees and up the hill. They were able to deliver the concrete right to the site, so we didn’t have to do anything this weekend.

This weekend we’re putting the rebar in place.

It’s taken a lot of work but the form boards for the concrete footing are almost done. It’s taken a lot longer to cut the steps and get everything level.

After digging the trench there’s still a lot of work needed to put in the form boards. There about a two foot drop from the top of the site to the bottom, so we will be stepping our footing down.

After the disaster with the bobcat we decided to rent an excavator and dig a trench for the footing. It was very heavy and we had problems towing it up a gravel road to get to the property. We ended up having someone with a bigger truck pull it up.

Once the excavator was on-site everything was great. It has a lot of power and had no problems ripping up tree stumps and digging the trench.

We had a rented Bobcat to try to rip out some tree stumps and create a level area for the footing. It was pretty useless, it had rained the entire week before and everything was too muddy to do anything.