Drilling the Well and Marking a Dome Foundation

The well is finally going in! We feel like this is a huge milestone because it is one of the big requirements to starting the house.

It took us this long to start the process because several things had to be done before the well company could start.

1.  The plot/site plan needed to show where the proposed location would be
2. The barn needed to be enclosed and ready with its concrete floor for the water tank
3. We needed to have the house staked so they could make sure they were the correct distance from the foundation walls of both the house and barn

We were ready with the plot plan over a year ago but the other two criteria just got checked off the list.

We tried our hand at concrete and did the cement slab in the barn ourselves. We decided not to hire a contractor because of our experience with the company that we hired for the barn foundation. Initially they were going to do the slab as well but they were so horrible we decided to stop before it got worse. Read about our first bad contractor HERE. It was so over the top I can almost laugh about it now! Our floor came out better than expected. It has some lines in it but it is flat and looks pretty good. I don't think the horses will judge us too harshly. I give huge credit to the guy driving the cement truck. He was really good at moving the chute around inside the doorway to help us get even spread with minimal shoveling. There aren't photos of us shoveling but I was able to get some of the finishing process.

The one thing this DIY project helped to highlight is the technical skill needed to get a smooth finished surface on the slab. We really should hire a company to do the dome slab or plan on sanding the floor to polish it. Of course that is a whole new set of skills. We have sanded wood floors ourselves in the past but not cement. We will have to run the numbers when the time comes to see what we can do. Ideally I would like to have a company do it so it comes out really smooth.

We went back and forth about having the surveyor come back out and stake the centers of the domes for us. When we talked to him about staking the house he was a bit confused about how to do it and it was going to cost us quite a bit to have him come out. This seemed like a good chance to save some money by just taking our time to figure it out. There are two pages of the plans that show how to lay it out. We decided the easiest way was to cut strings for each measurement.

We used cheap twine and duct tape labels to make every single measurement in this drawing into a physical thing. That way we wouldn't have to keep remeasuring everything as we were trying to get it perfect. It took about a hour of shifting things around but we managed to get stakes in the ground to represent each dome center. From each center we can use the radius to get each curve and know where the foundation exterior will be. That gives the well company a place to measure from. We will go back and do it again in the spring using all the twine lengths to get it perfect prior to breaking ground. Right now it is within an inch or two of where it will be finalized and that is good enough for the well company to go by. It did take me about 2 hours to make all the twine measurement cords but it saved us about $1000 by doing it ourselves.

The last several months we have been slowly chipping away at the barn construction. It has felt so slow but we are finally weather tight with only a couple pieces of trim left on the exterior. These came damaged and we had to order replacements.

The rough electrical is almost done. We still need to install the panels for the electrical service and pull one more interior wire. After the rough electrical we have an insulation inspection and then the final. The interior is still studs so we still have some work to do but it is at least ready to take on the New England winter AND ready for power and water. This is the biggest thing and the reason we built this barn first. Not bad for our first DIY building!