Every Valley Shall Be Exalted.
By Nathan
There’s nothing quite like a looming deadline to add excitement to a big project. A ticking clock can be a potent antidote to procrastination. Especially for someone like me, who is terribly lazy.
My wife Mary is pregnant.
She’s due at the end of November. We found out in April after this whole home expansion adventure started. So if I didn’t start with a hard deadline for finishing my addition, now I have one. Momma needs more room.
Almost a decade ago, I complained to the Lord about the tiny apartment that my wife and I shared with our new baby. God directed my attention to the snail. A snail always has a home, and it’s never too small nor too big. The home grows with the snail. The Lord explained that His provision of shelter, of daily bread, is not always enough to satisfy my appetites, but it’s always sufficient. Not what I want, but what I need.
The addition that I’m building is apparently not just about more space. It’s about more family. What a gift! It’s awfully fitting. When I started writing the story of this addition, I wrote that my prayer was that God build the House of Krupa into a greenhouse where my family can flourish. If run properly, a greenhouse should be fruitful. Fruitfulness is one of God’s very first blessings.
Building a wall.
I needed to keep moving. The concrete footer got poured on a Wednesday. On Thursday, I contacted my mason, David McGee, to let him know that I was ready for him to lay the concrete block for the foundation walls. I didn’t expect him to text me back, “Sure, I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Suddenly, I had a problem. Or a project. I needed to remove the plywood forms and the stakes holding them in place to make room for David to work. I had planned to do that project on Saturday morning. Timing is everything.
No time to waste!
After I got home from work Thursday, I got down to business. The grade stakes were screwed into the plywood forms and hammered into the rock-hard clay. Thank goodness for my friend Nick. He also lives out at the farm and has a handy dandy stake puller that he let me borrow. It’s designed for those green metal fencing stakes and even works on big 4″ posts. So I thought my little grade stakes would be easy.
Except for one small problem. Grade stakes are little, far too small for the heavy chain that the stake puller uses. I needed to figure out a way to attach the chain to these little stakes. After a little trial and error, I discovered that after removing the screws, I could tie a 12″ piece of 1/8 inch steel cable through the screw holes. That gave me something to hook with the chain and pull out.
I got some helpers at this point. A crowd of kids came to watch my private circus and I recruited my oldest son and his friend Kolbe to start removing the screws from all of the stakes. They both loved an opportunity to use a power drill. Boys love demolition. They didn’t quite get them all, but they still saved me a huge amount of time. All I had to do was cut a piece of cable, thread it through a little hole, tie a knot, and yank the stake out of the ground. 60 or 70 times. It took several hours.
Once the stakes were out, the plywood came up pretty easily. It was almost dark when I started my second task, which was putting all of the cinder blocks around the footer. I wanted to save David as much time as possible to cut down my costs. In the failing light, I moved about 200 cinder blocks into place by hand. Who needs to work out when you can work.
David started at some point the next day. I was at work. By the time I got home, he’d already made good progress laying block. Over the next several days, he laid the block wall. By the following Wednesday, he was done. My son Joseph loved watching him and even got a job as an assistant mason. David had him scrape the extra mortar off the wall. Joseph loved it.
Time for a work party!
Now came the big job: filling that open foundation with compactable sand. About three dump truck’s full. Maybe 50 tons. It was time for a work party.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to participate in a work party, don’t feel bad. I never knew they existed before I came to Alleluia. All you need for a work party is a really big job and a bigger group of friends to help you do it.
So I sent out a big group text message:
“We’re having a work party Saturday morning to fill my addition with compactable sand and tamp it down in preparation for pouring a concrete slab. I’m thinking breakfast at Steeleys at 7:30, work after that. It’s good work for strong sons. We’ll need shovels, wheelbarrows, and metal garden rakes if you have them.”
Steeley’s is a country diner just up the road. About 25 of us showed up for breakfast, much to the surprise of their one waitress. She was running around like crazy. She did a great job and was well tipped.
Many hands make light work.
After coffee and biscuits with sausage gravy, I was ready to work. My work party team went back to the house. I never got an exact count because people came and went. But I had a full crew of at least twenty people.
The work was simple. Move dirt and compact it down with a plate tamper. My friend Nick brought his tractor and focused his efforts on filling the area next to the back wall that was mostly empty. Other brothers started to shovel dirt into one of three wheelbarrows that were going the whole morning. Several men took turns moving the wheelbarrows and dumping the sand where it was needed. A couple of guys with garden rakes spread the sand around. The plate tamper ran constantly, compacting the soft sand into a hard layer that will be strong enough to support a concrete slab.
We had enough help that my friend Ross grabbed a few boys to help tear down the chimney. This broke my heart a little bit. I love my woodstove. There’s nothing like waking up early in the morning and starting a fire during my prayer time. But I figured that it had to come down and I wouldn’t have much use for a stove during the hot Georgia summer. Kolbe, my neighbor’s son, really enjoyed using a hammer to shatter the big terra cotta heat shield that passed through the house’s exterior wall. Boys love demolition.
Mary made hot dogs and fed the crew lunch. Lots of hot dogs. She also baked some fresh brownies. Delicious.
…Shall be exalted.
We took a string and a 2×4 and created a level line from the lower edge of the concrete block wall into the center of the pad. This gave us a visual image of the amount of dirt we needed to move to get to the right level. At some point looking at these little valleys that needed to be filled, one of the songs from Handel’s Messiah came to mind. “Every valley…. shall be exalted.” I started singing this song (not nearly as well as this opera singer) for the rest of the day.
Most of the crew had to depart after lunch, but we had already moved most of the dirt. Did I say 50 tons? Four stayed on to finish the last couple of inches of fill. It got hot, and we were already tired. It took the five of us almost two hours to do the last two inches. Did you know that you can put 40 full wheelbarrow’s full of dirt on a 24′ x 36′ pad with almost no discernible difference in height. Fact.
I was a little worried that I didn’t buy enough dirt as the pile dwindled throughout the day, but it turned out that we had just enough. We didn’t fill it perfectly full, but there was no way that I was going to get more dirt just to fill another half an inch. I would just do that with concrete.
I sent the rest of my crew home and did one more pass with the tamper. It took a while, because you tamp it making a cross hatch one way, then at a right angle, then on the diagonal. It’s a lot of work, but it really packs that dirt down and get it ready for the concrete. It needs to be packed down because the dirt will settle once the concrete gets poured, and if enough of the slab is unsupported, it will crack. So getting this packed down is very important. Worth the extra time and effort.
Even though it was hot and I was tired, my heart was filled with song. “Every valley… shall be exalted!” Joy overflowed. I think this joy came as the fruit of the tremendous outpouring of love that I had just experienced. There’s not much that shows a person’s love more that giving up a Saturday morning to sweat and shovel dirt to build your buddy’s house. I’m so grateful for my friends and their sons.
If you want to read more of my adventures building the House of Krupa, check out the archive!
Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.
