Good News and Bad News

Above, work is progressing, but it sure looks like a mess!

It’s been a wild week. I stopped over at the site on a Monday morning two weeks ago, and enough progress had been made so that the basement windows had the window bucks in. This gave me a good perspective on exactly where the basement windows were going to be and I was NOT HAPPY. The tops of the basement windows are at least a foot below ground. All the drawings had indicated that the tops of the basement windows were at ground level. Since the windows are two feet high, that puts the window three feet below ground with a window well 3 ½ to 4 feet deep. That’s halfway down to the foundation! Since the ground is pure clay, there’s going to have to be one hell of a drainage system to get rid of water in a heavy downpour, or the window wells will fill up and water will come in through the windows. I put a stop to the work for a day so I could think about what I wanted to do. If I raised up the windows, I had to raise up the entire first floor. It would have been a huge additional expense. The two front windows in the basement will be mostly above ground, and will let in light to the family room and bedroom, so I guess I can live with the side windows being below ground.

Above, you can see that the south basement windows are definitely below ground. Below pictures, the walls are up high enough so that the floor trusses can be put in.

These pictures were taken Saturday morning (October 18th). The floor trusses are in. You can see one of the guys has just laid the first piece of floorboard.
At the end of Saturday, not many floorboards had been laid. The whole floor was supposed to have been finished.
Here are 278 pavers I got at the ReUse Center. Not sure what exactly I'll use them for, but I have a few possibilities. I got a good deal on them. I almost broke my back loading and unloading them, though. First, I had to put them on a cart at the ReUse Center, then unload them from the cart to the truck, and then from the truck to the pallet at the house.

Below, just the finished floor trusses first thing Saturday.

More Progress on the Walls

These first three pictures are from earlier in the week. The walls have gone up considerably since the first pour. You can begin to see the basement windows.


Joe (whom you can't see behind the hose) and Howard are waiting for the cement to come out.

Joe is starting to pour.




Joe and Howard are hard at work. I left early to head over to another job site where Jeffrey Swainhart, my Construction Management Consultant, was helping on another project. He wanted me to see the Inline Windows I'm getting, which were installed on his other project, and the homeowner was putting a living roof on his house as well. I really wanted to see the living roof being installed, as I'm going to be putting one on my house.

Hopefully, we'll be moving along a little more quickly with the pours. I'm anxious to get the walls up, the roof on, the doors and windows in, and the house closed up so the utilities can be installed and I can start working on the inside. We're making progress.

1st lift completed, 1st pour completed

A course of blocks is one layer all the way around the perimeter. Friday morning (the 19th), there were 3 courses done (above). By Friday evening, 6 courses of block were competed. 6 courses equals a "lift." For Faswall, a lift is 4 feet high. Once the walls are 4 feet high, the concrete can be poured into the holes. Below shows the completed first lift. The empty space in front is the start of the opening for the basement bedroom egress window. As the second lift goes up, you'll see a lot more openings for windows appear. (Don't forget, you can get the picture to enlarge if you double click on it.)
Below is a view from the rear of the property.
Below, a view from the hill in front.
Here's Joe Haaf pouring cement from the boom into the walls.

If you look carefully in the close-up above, you can see the cement flowing between the blocks from left to right. As the cement is poured down into the block, it needs to flow between the blocks, as there is rebar placed horizontally every third course.
The photo above shows the cement truck operator moving the boom, the bottom shows the boom extended its full 55 feet.

Joe's worker is using a vibrating snake to get the cement to move down and fill up all the holes. the cement level dropped about a foot after he used the snake. Shelterworks, who manufactures the Faswall here in the U.S., recommends against using a vibrator, but this is a small one especially made for ICFs.

First lift is finished and ready to cure!

Walls are going up!

The two above and below pictures were taken Friday morning (Sep 12th) before work. The forms for the footings are mostly in place. Rocksolid Concrete had to have a city inspector come out and inspect before they could do the pour.When I stopped back after work on Friday, the footings had been poured and the first two courses of block had started. They put as many pallets of blocks in the hole as would fit, so as few blocks as possible had to be carried from pallets outside the hole. The walls looked plumb. You can see the wool inserts (for insulation) in the block holes and also rebar sticking up out of the holes. The blocks are stacked offset on each course. The first course of blocks (the bottom layer) was set directly onto the still-wet cement footings. The second course was stacked on top of the first, offset by half. It's hard to see from the pictures, because the blocks have a vertical "dent" in the middle of each side, but when the second course is stacked on the first, the blocks are shifted over so the middle of the block in the second course is centered over
seam betweens the blocks in the first course. It's no different than the setting of bricks or regular cement blocks; you always offset each course.

A Big Hole

People have been asking me since March when I was going to break ground. I kept saying "soon", but soon never happened. It finally happened last Wednesday, but it was delayed so I wasn't even there to see it! I had waited at the site for about two hours Wednesday morning. The dump trucks were lined up, Joe Haaf was there, the backhoe operator was there, but no backhoe. I finally left and went to work, and I guess the backhoe got there shortly after I had left. Oh, well. I had waited so long for that day and I missed it!

I'll post some pictures here, so people will really believe me. No big hitches in digging. There was a large pipe coming out of the ground which was embedded in concrete and rebar. It was meant to be a very sturdy pipe. There was a lot of speculation as to what was on the bottom end. Was it a well, or and underground tank? I was convinced it was a post for a carousel or merry-go-round. I'm not what it was for, but the good news is that there was nothing at the other end. Another small hitch was that there was a small dump in the middle of the lot that had a lot of building rubble; big hunks of concrete and some other junk. I'll have to pay extra for that to be disposed of. The third thing was that the ground is clay, not sand. There was a couple feet of sand under the top soil, but clay underneath that. The soil borings I had done, which went down 8 feet, showed just sand, not clay. I'm not sure exactly how that will affect things, but I guess sand is more stable than clay, so we would rather have had sand. Lucky I decided against a sand pit under the house, or I would have had to haul sand in for it.

Here are the dump trucks, all lined up and ready to go, but no backhoe.

Starting the dig.

Before digging.

Concrete rubble.

We're Finally Breaking Ground!!!

I’m assured that the trucks are lined up for tomorrow morning and the ground breaking will happen FOR SURE. I know I’ve said we’re going to start many times before, but the money and permit are in hand, and Joe Haaf of Rock Solid Concrete Services, who is doing the excavation and much of the building of the house, says that Tuesday, August 26th, is the day.

It's Final! Closing on August 7th

The appraisal came in at an amount I can live with, and the closing will be on Thursday, August 7th. So I'm finally going to get started. I contacted Joe Haaf at Rock Solid Concrete this morning to let him know I'm ready to go next week, and hopefully he'll be able to work me into his schedule pronto. Joe is doing the excavation, the masonry, and a lot of the work inside. He's kind of been "on hold" since May, when I thought we'd get started. But I had delays with the building permit (not being submitted in a timely manner), and then I didn't push getting the financing through as fast as I normally would have, since I knew it was going to take 6-8 weeks to get the permit. That was a critical error, as the bank suspended all construction to perm loans a few days before I was supposed to close, and I had to switch to yet another bank for the construction loan.

Now the pressure is on. There is a LOT of detail work that has to be decided (by me), things like exactly where the windows are going, where each electrical outlet will be, colors for the walls, the roof, what kind of wood for the floors and the color, etc. It's kind of overwhelming, but it will be worth it in the end.

I hope to have the actual date for the groundbreaking soon!