Soil and Poop

After Glenn and I decided to build our own house, we went to our local building department to find out what we have to do to get a building permit and to show them our floor plans. They liked our plans and told us we had to have the foundation plans engineered, but the floor plan was good. (More about that in a minute.)

Then we went to the health department to see if they had any requirements for keeping or updating our septic system. They said as long as it's functioning correctly, we can continue to use it. However, since we had been living here for 3 years and my mom had owned it as a rental for several years before that, we should have it pumped.

So I called American Septic and made an appointment for them to come out. And, boy, are we glad we didn't put it off!

Our septic tank was FULL! He said we were probably 8-10 rolls of toilet paper away from a back up. Eeeewwwww!
He emptied the tank and sprayed it down with water and pronounced it clean and ready to serve another 30 years! That was good news!

With the septic given a stamp of approval, our next step was to find an engineer to draw up our foundation plans. I looked up engineers on Google, found a couple and called them. I was told before foundation plans can be drawn (engineered), a soil test has to be done to determine what kind of soil we have which will determine what kind of foundation we have to have.

I played phone tag with 3-4 geotechnical engineers for about a week before I was finally able to hire one to come do our test.

They have to dig 2 holes about 3 inches in diameter and about 20 feet deep and take soil samples from this hole.  They dug one hole in the front: 

And one hole in the back: 

In the front at 20 feet down, they were still hitting really soft soil so he wanted to dig a little deeper. At 24 feet, he hit solid rock.

In the back, he hit rock at 20 feet. 

He said this was very good news. 

Now we wait for the soil report to be done, and then we wait for the plans to be drawn up. And they are running behind so they said it'll be about 3 weeks to get the soil report and about 2-3 weeks after that to get the plans. 

While we wait, we will be working on getting moved into the motor home (that we borrowed from some very good friends) and getting our old house torn down. I think we'll be doing very well to have that done by the time our plans are ready. It's a goal to shoot for!