I have a new worst enemy - dirt.
The first thing I needed to do for my house was get a fence built. The area where my house is going to be is currently a cow pasture and I can't have cows walking across my build site. I knew going into this project that digging was going to be a struggle for me - something about the way I am built just makes it really difficult for me to dig without injuring my back. My plan was to enlist the help of my dad and some machines to make this happen, but even then this process has been so much more difficult than I expected!
The problem is that the dirt where I am building has a very high clay content. When it gets wet the dirt gets extremely clumpy and dense and it takes a long time to dry out. Unfortunately, we have had about three weeks of non-stop rain in the past month so right now the ground is at its absolute worst. Digging any farther than about 10 inches into the ground by hand is near impossible. Even my dad who is an extremely strong person and has been digging holes in this same ground since he was a kid has been slowed to a crawl trying to dig post holes in these conditions.
My initial plan was to build a traditional barbed wire fence for the cows. There is already a barbed wire fence on one side of the place where I am putting my house so I was just going to build another three sides off of that fence to get my 100ft x 100ft square yard. I did the math and figured up I would need 11 holes dug to about 39 inches deep to make this fence happen, unfortunately its not gonna happen. The ground is just to muddy and clumpy right now to get a post hole dug that deep. It's disappointing that the very first thing I am attempting to do in this build is going so poorly, but it wouldn't be a project without a few setbacks. In order to get the fence up so that I could start working on the rest of the build I was going to have to switch to Plan B - hot fence.
Having an electric fence around my yard is not my first choice and it is definitely not the fence I am going to have permanently, but it is going to have to do for right now. Once I get the rest of the house built I can go back and dig the holes I need to make a proper fence. Hopefully by that time the ground will have dried out enough. At the moment though this is the best solution I have for keeping the cows out so that I can get on with the house build. The cows on the property currently have a mix of barbed wire and hot fence around their large pasture so they are already familiar with hot fence and know how to avoid it. They were watching me the whole time I put it together though - I am definitely not going to be without supervision during this home build!
Time To Start The House
After getting the fence up it was time for step 2 - marking where my house would go! I had already planned out on paper what my 100ft by 100ft yard would look like and where things would go. I have plans for my house, a carport, a driveway, and a solar array on my property. Right now I am just going to be working on the house and the rest will come later.
The foundation I am building for my house is going to be a concrete slab foundation that is 24ft by 36ft. I needed to mark on the ground where this house would sit so that my dad could help me dig for the footings (more on that later). I have never marked something this large before and I was worried about getting it square. I watched a few videos on YouTube about how to do this, but ultimately ended up mixing a few different methods together. I used string and some rebar dowels my dad had in his scrap metal pile to make the outline so that it would be movable until I got it perfect. I measured everything out on the sides and then put up my string before it was time for the final test - diagonal measurements. To make sure something is square you measure diagonally across it from one corner to another and then do the same measurement on the opposite two diagonal corners. If the measurements of the two diagonals are the same then it is square. After spending so long moving string and dowels around trying to get the house in the perfect spot I was worried that it would end up being very out of shape, but lo and behold when I measured the diagonals they were spot on the same length!
After getting the outside marked with string I needed to go back and mark it with spray paint. My dad has a Ditch Witch trencher that he is going to be using to help me dig the footings for my foundation and he said that the easiest thing for him would be if I marked lines where the edges of the footing needed to be in spray paint on the ground. He had some leftover spray paint from a project that he no longer needed so he gave me that to use and helped me mark the lines. The footings of the foundation are going to be 14 inches wide so we marked the outside rectangle and a rectangle 14 inches inside of that line.
My next step is going to be digging out the footings for the slab foundation. I am so glad that I am going to have my dad's help with this because (as I have discovered) digging is not my strong suit. Thankfully we have a machine that can help with this dig unlike with the fence posts. I am very excited to break ground and really hoping that this goes well over the next few days!
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