Building The Chirping Frog- Part 8

Our newest adventure is moving right along, before you know it we'll be opening The Chirping Frog, an antique, collectibles, vintage, home decor, furniture, artisan wares and more shopping mall.  I am also planning to host classes in a variety of fun topics; such as mosaic, hypertufa, jewelry making, paper arts, etc.  Any artists out there looking to teach a class?  I am so excited and a little terrified all at the same time.  Here are some links if you're interested in following our progress:

• Part 1- Clean-up
• Part 2- Dirt Work
• Part 3- Tons of Rock & Footings 
• Part 4- Foundation Walls
• Part 5- Foundation Walls Poured
• Part 6- Forming Bathroom Walls
• Part 7- Bathroom Walls Poured

When I left you in Part 7 we'd just poured the bathroom walls along with the pillars for the front porch and rock work was about to begin.  It's been a crazy week.  We spent the first of it removing forms and cleaning up.  We made a little boo-boo here that we need to fix before the "cap" for the bathrooms gets poured.  The plan was to leave the top layer of forms all the way around the outside to support the "cap" pour.  Well, we got a little ahead of ourselves and pulled one wall before we realized (remembered), duh!  Not sure we'll be able to get them back on but that's a job to figure out another day.

Once the forms were cleared out we started messing with the rock pile left from Part 3 (when over 700 ton of rock was delivered).  That took a couple days.

You can see in the picture above that we're low across nearly half of the building.  That's about the time the compactor died.  Perfect timing.  Saturday morning I show up to find it in pieces and we headed off to St. Louis Nu-Way to pick up a rental.  A rider at that!  I cannot even tell you how happy I am about that.

Here's my new toy for the week.

On Sunday Jason continued working with rock piles while Caleb and I shoveled rock into the bathroom area and got it compacted and ready to go.  Did I mention I really hate shoveling rock, don't know how others make it look so easy!

Monday I was on my own as they dumped rock and I spread it around as best I could so hubby could fix it when he got off work.  We spent a couple hours that night spreading and compacting preparing for, you guessed it, more rock on Tuesday.

Here's what it looks like after last night, it did get compacted one more time after this photo.  We are still roughly an inch low over the entirety of the building.  Another 60 ton of rock and it'll be ready.  Time for an electrician and plumber to do some rough-in work and we'll have a floor.  Bring on the framers!