Does it have a roof yet?

No roof yet.

as you might have guessed, it's been very busy on the farm, between the vegetables, the guests, lively pot-lucks, and of course, building a house. I finally got the pictures from back when we worked on the foundation, so i thought I'd do a little educational illustration of how to build a foundation. If you really want to build one of your own, there are probably very good books with instructions, but this is what we did.

as nicholas mentioned previously, we dug a trench.

we also built a frame around the trench to hold the concrete in place until it dried.
the trench was about 4 feet below the top of the frame. this should give us a border of concrete (about 8inches wide, but sometimes wider because of our inprecise digging) that goes down below the frost in winter. in the middle of the house, we poured fine gravel and tamped it down. the concrete doesn't need to go below the frost there, because it shouldn't get as cold, since it's protected by the outside barrier, and our house.

then the plumbers came and put the pipes in the ground:


Did I mention that it rained many inches the week that everyone was in town to build this house? It's a big challenge to dig in all that mud!

before pouring the concrete, we put insulating foam around the outside, and rebar where the floor would go.

Here's the cement truck and everyone must act fast!

and it's time to smooth: