Installation Day!

Today's the day! Yesterday evening our mover (who is also installing our foundation) dropped off his tractor after finishing another job a few miles away. On his way to work this morning, John called me and said, "Honey, I think part of our house just drove past me!" Sure enough, 20 minutes later the crew showed up. I'm going to have to bake cookies for our neighbors because pieces of our house were in other people's ditches and chilling in the parking lot of the gas station at the end of the street.

It took about two hours for them to spread out and tamp down the foundational clay. I'm sure their tractor is first rate, but it made me miss the backhoe from yesterday. It probably could have taken out that dirt in half the time. :-/

As soon as the foundation was laid and everything was leveled to spec, the moving process began. Meet Snuffy the Freightliner. He brought each piece in one at a time.

What can only be described as a giant jack with bulldozer wheels then came out and was slid under the first piece to move it precisely into place.

When planning where your house will sit, there are a number of things that you have to take into consideration. First, there needs to be 16-foot wide clearance to haul most pre-manufactured pieces into place. That's why we had to cut down the leyland cypress trees flanking the driveway. While the pieces themselves are only 13-foot wide and the driveway is 14-foot, the trees made the clearance unacceptable. Once they started pulling in I could see why. The truck beds were shadowing the trunk stumps.

Another thing you have to consider is where all your utilities will be coming from. The back/front/side/whatever of your house must be at least 5 feet from the edge of the septic tank. Also, depending on your local code, you may have to be a certain number of feet from your electrical pole. Our pole isn't in yet, but the engineer has already come out to look at how he needs to run wires around trees and existing poles. He staubbed off where he wanted to put the pole with a wooden stake and a white ribbon. That means the crew not only has to be about 5 feet from the staub, but they have to account for the inches radius of the pole as well. The mover told me a story about being just one inch off of a septic tank and having to either pay the septic installer $300 to move the tank or losing $2000 in work for his guys to move the whole house.

Once you have your first piece in place, they roll out a moisture barrier on top of the foundation. Then they begin to build up the footers with different sizes of cement block and wooden shims.

After a break for lunch, the crew got back to work moving in the rest. Installation won't be finished today, but they promised to be back out "first thing in the morning" to assemble everything else. It's exciting! Now that it's here I'm no longer freaking out that everything's going to explode. Now I'm freaking out because it's not happening fast enough. Can you imagine how miserable I'm going to be staring at a house that has no power or water all weekend?