Foundation.

I remember sitting down earlier this year to a clean sheet of graph paper with a mechanical pencil and a clear plastic drafting triangle.  (The triangle, like my devotion to Staedtler-Mars plastic erasers, is left over from my Engineering Graphics class almost thirteen years ago.)

What I drew that day was one shape inside another congruent one, rectangles with a rectangle-shaped corner removed.  Later I added interior walls, details, staircases, places for windows.  But what I see today is that first pair of shapes, sketched in wooden planks and set in sand.

   The crosshatching I added between the two lines will here be written in concrete. 

That’s some pencil.

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The next morning, some mysterious bundles have appeared.  What could they be?

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Ah, it’s material for constructing the forms.

Incidentally, doesn’t the angle of repose of that sand pile, cut off the way it is by the edge of the hole, look a little… ominous?  Would you want to be standing in that man’s shoes, there in the center of the photograph?  I assume he knows what he’s doing, but… that’s sand.  And the edges of the hole collapsed in on themselves in several places before they started work yesterday.

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Up where it looks a bit safer:  Sparks fly as a saw bites rebar.

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When Milo woke up this morning I asked him, "Do you want to see the men working outside?"  He gaped at me and whispered urgently, "Men!"

I showed him this scene and he shouted appreciatively, "House!"

It is certainly becoming recognizable as one.