As the sun rises on another hot July morning -- but at least it has been dry enough at last for us to get the foundation work under way for our new home. (That's the new home in the photo, sitting in the driveway under the blue tarps.)

If you don't know, last November we found an ad for First Day Cottages, designed to be buildable by even those as ignorant of building as We. Kevan is very clever, and we're relying on that to stand in for a lifetime of carpentry undone. Kevan instead wasted his adult life working at Barclay's Bank, while Pat poked around on computers, turning out letters and such for Important People. Not having tool-saavy relatives within 600 miles, we'll be celebrating our year of turning 60 putting up this house by ourselves. We hope to finish the project younger and stronger, and we hope we inspire someone else turn a dream into reality.

We are building a 16x40 foot "Original" cottage, two story post-and-beam with a full walkout basement at the top of our open field, just to the left in the photo above, and bit up the hill. If you would like to see what the First Day Cottages look like, go to www.firstdaycottage.com.

As I said, we saw the ad for First Day Cottage in November, and by early January we were sure we wanted to do this. Since planning permission and financing were easily arranged in our case, we had hopes of getting started in early spring. The snow during the winter had been sparse, and there really wasn't much in the way of a "mud season" this year. April was warm and dry and very encouraging. "Just a little drier" said Tom Barker. Then came May. I knew I should not have taunted my sister about the April rains in California. In May, the rains came. And they didn't leave until early July. We still have large patches of grass in the field that are the consistency of pudding.

But by the end of June I guess Tom couldn't face putting us off any longer, and he dug the hole for the foundation. The rain slowed a little, and July 11th Tom Murch came and bravely installed the footings for the foundation. Shortly after he left, the skies opened up and we had a record-breaking downpour for nearly 2 hours. When it was over, the foundation looked like this:


Yes indeed, the temptation was there to redraw the plans to include an indoor pool. It turned out that even without the downpour we had enough water to do that burbling up from the southwest corner outside of the foundation. While we dug 480 feet to get water for our well, we apparently hit a lovely spring about 4 feet down from the surface at the house site.

But on July 21st Mr. Murch returned and gave us walls to go with the footing, and we had this much more hope-full scene:



(The foundation is straight, Earth is crooked.) Next chapter will be Adventures in Waterproofing. Unless something else goes wrong....