Progress this past week:
Septic system is finished and buried, ready to use. County inspector approved it (this is the ONLY permit required for the entire project; shop, apartment, house, everything! Got to love rural Texas and the lack of regulations/government intrusion in your life). I climbed up on a large dirt pile (from the excavation of the hill) to try and get a picture of the whole layout, but you can't see anything because all the soil from the trenches is just piled next to the trenches:
Final photo of the digestion tanks, just before burial. Only one hatch on the first tank will be accessible from the surface to pump the tank, if necessary. Installer says that all the solids will stay in the first tank. He recommends having the first tank pumped once every 5-6 years so that solids don't accumulate to the point of filling it up - but on the system on our current house, we have have never pumped it in 13.5 years, and it still works perfectly.
Painters have been in the apartment for 2.5 days; they should be finished today. Granite for counter tops and window sills was cut yesterday, and hopefully will be installed next week. We are planning on moving in by this time next week. We signed a contract with the realtors to put our current house on the market by April 1st, so we have a ton of work and moving to do before then. Fortunately, the new place is only 4.5 miles / ten minutes from the existing house. I make two-three trips a day with my 5'x10' single-axle trailer full of stuff, stacking it in the shop for now.
Pulling down some old boxes that had been stored above my office in my current shop since we moved here, I found this guy:
I've waged a constant war against squirrels since we've been here. The little bastards get in everything; make nests in my shop insulation, chew up plumbing risers on the roof of the house, eat the chicken food, and are general pests. But we have hundreds of post oak and other trees on our current place, and the squirrels breed faster than I can shoot and poison them, or the hawks, owls, and rat snakes can eat them.
As far as the construction on the big house goes, the excavation is finished, except that we left maybe a foot or so above grade to do the final leveling just before we start pouring concrete. Since that won't be until after the current house is sold and closed on, we thought it best to leave it for now. Also, the excavation ran over budget, and I'm running out of ready cash until the current house sells.
That said, we do need some technical data on the soil and rock beneath the home site - because of the weight of the concrete home, we must ascertain the weight-bearing capacity in lbs./sq. ft., and the plasticity (basically, how much the clays in the soil will expand or move with moisture), ad a few other things like pH and etc. So, I hired a geotechnical engineering firm in a neighboring county (our county is too small to have such) to drill some cores under the home site, and analyze them in the lab.
The truck-mounted coring rig on location:
Cores were taken at two different locations on either end of the home site, about 30' in from each end. The cores are about 2.5" in diameter and look like this when they come out of the simple tube core barrel:
The weight of the rig will push the core barrel through soil. When the going gets harder (compacted soil or solid rock), they can put an hydraulic hammer on it:
They can also drill with a simple bit and an auger, and collect the cuttings from the bottom with the core barrel.
In any event, samples are taken every foot for at least 25'. Samples are bagged, sealed, and marked with footage and orientation (top and bottom), and boxed for transportation to the lab:
Not sure how long it will take for the lab testing and to get results, but there is no hurry since nothing more will be done on the big house until after the current house is sold.
The next two weeks will be hectic, just getting the apartment finished, moving into it, and getting the old house cleaned out and ready to list.
