Hand digging and forms

I couldn't dig deep enough with the skid steer, so I still have to dig a decent amount by hand...

Now to make those weird pyramid forms, thank god for online calculators to do at least some of this stuff.  It was still a big pain to cut everything to fit properly.

Machine digging for the footings

I used my friend's skid steer to do the bulk of the digging.  Of course I forgot about the garage wiring so I cut right through it...

Now in the future I'll be running 100A service out there, but I'm not even close to being ready to do that, and I still need power out there so I'm just soldering this back together for now.  Definitely not ideal, but wire is expensive...  Also this is underground so it's not really much of a fire hazard.

I also have to re-route the existing conduit since one of the footings is going right where it was.

Pulling lube made a huge difference for getting the wire back through.

Since I had to re-route the conduit, it goes farther so the wire's not long enough to reach the panel, which is just wonderful.  So I spliced on some other wire I had laying around using clamps and a bunch of tape.  It's a good thing I don't have any kids.

Now I decided to mark out where the first footing was going to go.  I still have to do more digging so I'm below the frost line.

Starting on the new balcony

Since I'll be eventually be living only upstairs while I work on the downstairs and basement, I need a way to get in up there.  I'd rather it be nice, so I just need to build a balcony off the master bedroom in the back.  This roof next to the master bedroom is weird, so I'm just going to rebuild that along with it.  First step is removing that asbestos siding I guess.

I decided to mark out where I want the supports to be and then start on plans for the framing and footings.

The vertical joists are for the balcony part, and the horizontal ones are for the roof next to it, and that continues back farther than the drawing shows.

I had one of my civil engineer friends help with the math for the column sizes, and this what we came up with at the beginning.  It's built strong enough for high snow loads with minimal sinking into the ground over time.  It'll probably be strong enough to park a car on, but its not really big enough to do that.

Now that's a lot of concrete bags, I ended up getting the 50lb ones since they cost about the same per bag as the 80lb bags but are easier to handle.

And some more marking to for scale, and it's nice to see this stuff more before digging.