Blowin' in the Wind

With the last week’s temperature and this weekend’s snowfall, we are definitely feeling like winter is here. We were hoping to beat the cold and get into the ground prior to this, but no such luck. This fall, when we were contemplating purchasing the house, I thought a winter start would be too difficult, if not impossible. We quickly found out that we had options.

We still have not closed on the house, but have an agreement with the owners to put insulating blankets on the ground to prevent it from freezing. These are specially designed blankets for this use. You can even get blankets that plug in and warm the ground to allow for a winter construction start. Straw or hay is also an option, but it has to be secured so that it doesn’t all end up in the neighbor’s yards. (Great way to start off in a neighborhood!)

The blankets were put in place last weekend, but when Kevin was at the house the other day, the blankets were all out of place, blown by the wind. He was able to put them back in place and our contractor came out to secure them down- but we’re not sure if the ground was exposed for too long and how deep the ground may have frozen. We’ll find out when they’re ready to excavate if the electric thawing blankets will be needed.

Every project has things that don’t go ideally and for us, the schedule definitely fits into that category. We put in an offer on the house after we were confident that we could come up with a workable solution (although we didn’t know exactly what that solution would be). Because we wanted to do a construction loan for the purchasing of the property and the construction, we had about 1 month to develop a design and do the construction documents. Although we would have liked to spend months debating design decisions, we just can’t afford that luxury on our schedule. It’s a good thing we’ve been able to agree on decisions (most of them anyway)- which is a rarity for 2 architects!