If you’ve been following along, you know that progress on this build has sometimes felt like two steps forward, one step back — and occasionally one step sideways while chasing someone down the street. But we are HERE, friends. We have walls. Real ones. That you can walk through. And I may have cried a little.
Let me catch you up. ______________________________________________
The Foundation Pour — Almost a Perfect Day!
We’d already watched concrete flow once before with the stem wall, so this wasn’t our first pour. But the foundation felt different. This is the foundation — the literal base of our future home. We are rebuilding our lives from the ground up, and standing there watching concrete fill that space, I kept thinking: everything we build from here sits on this. It sounds dramatic, but after everything we’ve been through, watching that foundation go in felt like more than construction. It felt like a promise.
The day started strong, but midway through the pour, the cement trucks didn’t arrive in time and we hit a two-hour delay. Here’s something I learned that day: once you start pouring a foundation, you must finish it the same day. No pausing, no picking it up tomorrow. So the crew pushed through.
By evening, the pour was done — but then came the cuts. After a foundation is poured, they cut lines into the surface to control where cracks form as the concrete cures. Smart engineering, but the equipment is loud. At 8:30pm, our neighbor was ready for bed. By 8:45, the crew wrapped up. Fifteen minutes. Our neighbor was not thrilled, and honestly, we completely understand — it wasn’t exactly a lullaby. We’re grateful for the patience of the people who live around us through all of this.
It really does take a village.
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Troy Goes Full Detective 🕵️
This one still makes me laugh….
One afternoon, Troy noticed someone loading rebar from our property. He didn’t recognize the guy, didn’t know what was going on, and did what any reasonable homeowner living in a 5th wheel 10 feet from his construction site would do — he followed him.
The guy drove to a house just a few minutes away on the other side of the island. Troy confronted him, and the guy calmly said his supervisor told him to grab it and gave the supervisor’s name. That’s when Troy realized — oh. That’s one of our subs.
Apparently this is completely normal in construction. Subcontractors routinely move materials between job sites. I had absolutely no idea. Honestly, I still don’t fully understand how they keep track of what materials go where across different projects, but as I always say — not my monkey, not my circus. We did ask our builder to give us a heads up when that’s going to happen going forward, because the difference between “normal construction activity” and “someone stealing your rebar” is not immediately obvious when you’re watching someone load your stuff into a truck. 😂
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The Column Situation — A $10,000 Word Choice 💰
Here’s one that stings a little, but we’re moving through it.
After the first floor block was set and the columns were framed out exactly per the plans, the city inspector flagged a question. He thought it was probably fine but wanted clarification from the engineer. What followed was one of those moments where you realize how much precision language matters in construction documents.
The word the engineer used in the plans? That’s exactly what the foundation subcontractors built. The problem was, the engineer had something different in his head when he wrote it. The written word and the mental picture didn’t match, and the columns were built to the written word.
The fix required additional steel, a full day of labor to take apart the already-framed columns, and reframing them correctly before they can be poured. Total cost: $10,000. And yes — in these situations, that falls on us as the homeowner. Not ideal. Not fun. But we’re told the original build would not have caused structural issues — it likely would have resulted in cosmetic cracking and chipping in the columns over time. So while the cost stings, it’s the right call.
Lesson learned: even the best engineers are human, and on a build this complex, having eyes on every step matters more than we ever could have imagined.
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The I-Beam Has Entered the Chat 🏗️
I wasn’t home for the delivery — I was at an offsite meeting — but Troy was there and grabbed the most impressive photo. A 27-foot, more-than-2,000-pound I-beam on a flatbed truck, and it looks exactly as enormous as it sounds.
We’re hoping to capture video of the actual installation too. Watching a beam that size go into place is the kind of thing you don’t forget.
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Walking the Floors — Our Favorite New Hobby 🚶♀️🏡
Here’s the part that has genuinely made everything feel worth it.
We have walls. You can see the structure of the house. Every few days, one of us wanders through the footprint. Sometimes it’s Troy and me. Sometimes it’s V and me. Sometimes all three of us together. And honestly, watching V get excited now that she can see real walls and real structure has been one of the sweetest parts of this whole journey.
We are actually, finally, building our home. 🙌
Two Dogs and a Demo 