House Raising

This is the first (I hope) of a series of blogs chronicling our village house raising. We waited a long time for the dirt to build up our foundation (necessary since the banks of the river nearby often flood) but now that construction has begun, it'll take some fast blogging to keep up! We're building a three room house on stilts with a porch (very important feature). Cement stilts (more secure and cheaper than wood), wooden house, and zinc roofing (so we can tap dance to rain storms on our roof). The stilts were going in this week... 12 feet long, 9 feet above ground. Should be enough room underneath for parking our car, keeping our chickens (he he) and chasing our children. We opted for a house on stilts because it's much cooler (will catch the breezes from the river), better for the vermin, and more scenic (we need some height to see over the papaya trees around us) than a cement house on the ground.
So here they are, shaping the concrete stilts... And those big holes in the ground... We had some deliberations this week about how many stilts we would actually need, since we are modifying (enlarging a bit) a basic house plan we obtained from Habit for Humanity. 11 or 14? Thankfully the deliberations were more or less a misunderstanding, and we're confident that 11 stilts will keep her standing for the duration. :)
Tomorrow we'll be back in the village to check on more developments... Thanks for lifting us up in this process!