Farm 76, Parksville NY

Sometimes it’s just brute force, willing the job to be done.  Spending some money, problem-solving, and attacking.

That’s sort of the situation up in Parksville, just south of Livingston Manor, just north of Liberty.  I live in Milford PA, which is an hour south of said locations, and an hour can make a big difference. Down here in the Sunny South where my son has had hardly a full week of school since New Years, and last week after the ice storm had delays of 2 hours for 4 of the 5 calendar days.

So the brain just assumes that what is true has some resemblance to what is true just an hour north, but no, when I did a site visit the other day, it was still a frozen, icy, lake chilled job site with a foot of snow on the ground.

And because we started building this in early December, caught sleeping a little bit since the fall was so temperate, and then whack, it got cold, and stayed cold.  We were just getting started on the foundation and only needed a week to get it in and backfilled, but a week we didn’t have.  Temps dropped and we reacted with frost and freeze protection for our new footings - hay and tarps and insulated blankets, and waited for the break in the weather that always comes.  And waited, and waited.

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And then we did have a break in the weather with a few days creeping to 50 degrees in early January or so, with some rain, and we thought we were golden until we tried to get our big concrete form trucks to the site on the private driveway and learned that the driveway was never built with sufficient base rock to support large trucks - the rain and frost and thaw and produced the worst conditions for driveways possible, so this resulted in a large 10 ton boom truck carrying form trucks getting stuck and having to be towed out in quite the tricky operation.

And then we waited some more, with the foundation forms in place, covered with tarps, footings covered with hay, large and high piles of dirt freezing and hardening - waited as the temps dropped below zero and stayed there.

The temps would pop into the 20’s or high 20’s which is fine for pouring concrete; the problem was they would then dip into the low teens overnight, or the single digits, and that puts a lot of pressure on the curing period you need for concrete correctly.  You can add additives that help it set up better, faster, but there is still a limit.

This is when it pays to be surrounded by professionals - giving good advice, ready to act and jump at the first opportunity.  That’s one thing, among many, that is true about Catskill Farms - we have professionals at every level that are committed to serve and get it done.  Sometimes it takes speed, other times brute force, other times creativity, many times a combination of all 3, plus others.  And not just the company in question, but then they leverage those attributes to their vendors and suppliers, their drivers, their factors of production.  So to get something like this foundation poured safely in this type of weather environment you have this whole set of direct and indirect relationships participating, from the salesperson, to the desk guy, to the dispatcher, to the truck driver.   It’s not child’s play.

So we get the foundation in, but then they have to strip their forms, they need to boom them out of there, we have to waterproof the foundation, all weather dependent, and needing to be closely managed, since the risk is you push through the weather to the detriment of the house- but we just watched and waited, like a tiger in the tall grass of the plains.  Ready to pounce in these small windows this brutal winter offered.  Big trucks, in tight spots, in sketchy conditions that change hourly.

But we got the foundation in, uncovered and massaged the dirt piles to find the soft stuff and not the frozen layer on top, backfilled around the house the best we could, and let Dean the framer know we were ready - sort of ready.  The basement had a foot of snow in it, and the back porch piers didn’t get in because of the frost in the ground, but still plenty to do.

That’s when things got really interesting - when the temps dropped again, when it was mixed with snow, and worse, ice storms.  When the lake winds whipped up the hill.  And Dean showed up each day, fought off the elements, worked through them, not as quickly, but worked through them, including the coldest week of year with the highs in upper single digits, meaning mornings near zero.

Air guns hardly work, generators struggle, wood creaks and moans as it moves.   The men move like on the moon - slowly and methodically, double checking each step of the way.  I told Dean just to take the week off and we could start again the following week but he chose to keep going - ‘ the guys need a paycheck’ - is his mantra.  

When he was done, somehow the roofer got his roof paper on, protecting the home from further participation, and measuring up for the metal roof, that always gets field measured.

And that’s when the final leg of the relay happens - when my team comes in, shovels the 6” of ice crusted snow off the interior floor decks of the house, encases the basement in plastic - like Dexter, the friendly serial killer - and turning on the heat - coaxing the house dry, melting the snow/ice in the basement, trying to get it melted off so can continue with the putting plumbing in the basement slab and continue with the job.

No editing or re-reading, so if you get here before I go back and do those things, please accept my apologies.