Today was day 2 of the footings. We needed to level them and get the rebar in and ready for inspection. Here is the time-lapse video for the day;
I figured we would be able to get it done in just a few hours, so I booked the inspector to come during his next available slot, 2 days away. They Dysert Concrete guys usually work in a bigger town near by and didn’t realize that my township only has one inspector and that he only inspects for 6 hours a week. They assumed they could finish the rebar, call in the inspector and still pour the same day. Fortunately, we talked about the plan at the start of the day. Some quick phone calls were made to stop the concrete trucks and then they got to work unloading the rebar and other equipment from the truck. Doug Dysert didn’t make it out today (so I still haven’t been able to give him a check or see a bill). Baudilio, who I worked with the most on Friday, returned, but with two new guys; Don, a more experienced (20 year) veteran and Chris, the younger guy (9 years experience, but only one week with Dysert) who got the less pleasant jobs.
Bau got to work on adding stakes around the footings while Don got to calculating the volume for the next days pour (I wasn’t surprised that his number was half a yard higher than my computer model predicted). Chris, the new guy was unloading the truck. I was just standing around without much to do. So, I asked if I could use the motorized tamper. It was kind of fun, as long as I didn’t try to back up. I went around the “track” a few times until I felt like I was wasting time.
Talking to Doug on Friday and he mentioned that these motorized tampers are pretty expensive if you buy them new. He said that the motors don’t last long, but the base lasts forever. He always looks for an old one that doesn’t run, buys it cheap and then replaces the motor. Good as new for less than half the price.
Then the more experienced guys got to work leveling the footings using a rotary laser level and a sensor on a measuring rod. They set the rod on the top of the footing and the sensor beeps to indicate if it is higher or lower than the laser. Fast beeping meant they footing was too high and needed to be lowered until they got a steady tone. Slow beeping meant it was too low and needed to be raised. Either way, they would screw the forms to the stakes at the correct height and continue on to the next section.
While they were doing that, Chris was cutting “rebar chairs”. These keep the rebar at the right position in the concrete and out of the sand. I “helped” by suggesting that he could probably cut thru more than one at a time. I like to think I increased his productivity by 600% ;^) Again, without much real work to do, I tried to keep myself busy by distributing the rebar chairs around the site.
After the forms were leveled, there were some gaps under them, particularly where they had been lifted up by several inches. Again with nothing else to do, I got to work backfilling behind the forms with dirt so they concrete wouldn’t just leak out. It turned out that I had not back-filled nearly enough and Chris went around behind me and did a lot more.
Meanwhile, the other two guys finished leveling and switched to bending and placing rebar. They had brought a manual rebar bender/cutter, but never used it. Instead they used a concrete saw with a 12 inch grinding wheel for cutting (caution, that rebar is still hot for a long time after). All the bending was done “freehand” as needed. They did have a rebar tie gun that is 
supposed to make the job easier, and it probably did, when it wasn’t messing up, or running out of energy, and it sure used a lot of tie wire (several reels worth). I looked up the specific gun they were using and it costs $3,385 to $3,865 depending on the specific model.
Warning to anyone who wants to come out and help me: I think I will tie the rebar in the walls and ceiling with manual rebar tie hooks that use the little pre-cut and looped pieces of tie wire. I wonder if an 8 year old and a 10 year can handle that?
The #4 rebar is pretty easy to bend, but not very easy to “curve” into the right shape, especially once you mess up. I tried a few curves and decided I was hurting more than helping, so I stuck to the straight pieces with the simple bends.
The experience with free hand curving rebar was enough to convince me that such an approach would not be acceptable when I am working on the rebar for the vaults. I will look into getting the rebar “factory” curved, or else build some sort of jig out of stakes to try and come up with a more precise method.
B
efore heading out there, I had looked up the coordinates where the “concrete encased electrode” would be. This is basically using the rebar in the footing as an additional grounding rod. So I set that up, complete with the rebar grounding clamps.
Lastly, I helped position some tubes in the footings so that we will have bleed holes, holes for the radon pipes and an exit to the septic system later.
We were done in just over 4 hours.
Next up, inspection to check our work and then we can pour the concrete.
Today was the first day of installing the footings on our Earth Sheltered Umbrella home. You can find the video here.
After the initial excavation, we tried to stake out the basement but the hole wasn’t big enough and we had to call back the excavators to dig a little bit wider (see the last post). When I showed up on Friday (after a nearly a week off the site), I found that it was excavated well enough most of the way around, except on the north east side. On the west side, they had to excavate past the side of where the garage footing would have gone. The plan B had been to setup the footings for the basement and garage at the same time, but the over excavation cut into dirt under the garage, so we will need to save that for after the excavation. Plan C was to just form the basement footings and consider that practice for the rest later.
The crew from Dysert Concrete arrived on site around noon. There was a range of experience from one who had worked with Doug Dysert since they were both children, to the new guy who had started that week. No one on the team had ever done curved forms before, but they were all up to the challenge.
At one point, Doug sent the new guy to get the majibulator from the front of his truck. The new guy scrambled up out of the hole and got half way to the truck before Doug called him back and told him that there was no such thing as a majibulator.
Doug had brought 12 inch lap siding for the curved portions of the form and 2x12s for the straight parts. My computer model had made it pretty easy to estimate how much of each material we needed, but due to the change of plans (not doing the garage), I ended up with some extra materials on site. The lumber yard was out of stakes Doug bought 1x4s and sharpened them on site.
The team decided that Sherri and I had done a good job on the stakes (within a quarter inch and enough extra ones to capture the shape) so they used them directly and started forming within a few minutes.
Doug had brought his copy of my plans and we referenced it regularly. It was a bit of a hassle because the plans incorrectly showed the footings as 1.5 ft wide in the main view (the more detailed views correctly showed 2 ft). This caused at least one mistake where we made one of the piers 6 inches wider than it needed to be. The plans also did not include the extra footing bits that the building inspector wanted, so we had to remember to add those.
Doug had to leave part way through the afternoon for another appointment (so his crew will have work all summer), which left me responsible for the layout. Along the way, I made several mistakes that I realized right after the boards were cut and nailed into place. Some could be easily undone (such as the east pier where I just cut a board too long for where I intended it, but it still fit perfectly in the next spot. Other mistakes were not worth fixing and just added a little volume to the piers. The other guys (Baudillio and Jose) were pretty patient with me and only chucked a little when I would say, “No, wait, thats not right.” When I slowed down I made fewer mistakes. In total, I figure my errors only added about 4 cubic feet to the 18 cubic yards needed for the footing. That is less than 1 percent. (total concrete volume of the basement footings is 18 cubic yards (486 cubic feet) or about 73000 lbs).
I was very careful to place the inside boards so that each would only have 1 side and 1 end against concrete. This will make it much easier to remove them later.
The north east side of the site (top right corner of the scene, mostly off camera) was not excavated far enough and the guys had to dig it out manually… They ended up re-digging it numerous times because they didn’t throw the dirt in the right place (twice) and because the sand wall behind kept caving in and dumping more sand in the area. In the hot sun, it became a “laugh so you don’t cry” sort of thing, but we managed to get that last footing in and everyone left by 5:00 PM.
I noticed that when the guys wanted to keep their water jugs cool, they buried it in the cool earth. They didn’t build a little wooden box around it. Just sayin’
I also noticed that a couple of the guys put oats in the bottom of their water bottles… I wasn’t sure if they were eating those as a snack while they drank or had some other reason. The “new guy” asked about it and the others laughed and asked him if he ever had oat meal. “Same thing”, they said.
The laser level Doug brought was not working, so we just put the forms in for now and will need to come back next week to level them and add the ton (literally) of rebar.
When it was done and the guys were packing up, they said, “At first we thought the curves would be harder, but it all went pretty easy.” They all took pictures. I assume they don’t think most of their jobs are photo worthy.
If I did it again, I would use a saw table to make straighter cuts for the boards. The free hand cuts were pretty sloppy and made it harder to get the 90 degree angles for the piers. I guess it was good enough for footings work, but I don’t think it would have been any harder to make the more precise cuts and may even have made it easier to assemble and level. The hardest part would have been getting the table and power down into the hole.
Monday is rebar day, and hopefully I can get the building inspector out there on Wednesday so we can still pour this week… Now I need to think of what to do with the extra concrete. Any ideas? I am thinking a bucket rocket stove could use up a little.
Saturday, our kids each had soccer games, one after the other. Each of my boys won their games (3 to 2 and 5 to 3). By the time the games were over, it was mid afternoon, we dropped them off with their grandparents and headed out to survey the basement. We were using a builders level that I rented, again. We had to do the job again because all the previous stakes were dug up during the excavation. Well, I should say most were dug up. Sherri had run some extra stakes further out so that we could re-establish the location of the center of the house. The excavators had been careful not to disturb those markers.
When we got there, it was kind of cool to be able to drive up our new driveway… Its the little things ;^)
We started with the long line that Sherri had marked out before the excavation. We tied some masons line between the stakes that she had placed 50ft on either side of the center (the excavation was about 60 ft across). We tied a plumb bob to the mason’s line at the middle point and let it hang into the excavation. The sand was also very soft and rough, so I spent some time flattening the area, especially around the hanging plumb, with my 10” tamper. I then positioned my marked concrete paver (90lbs) centered under the plumb and lined its etched angles up with the mason’s string overhead. Then we setup the builder’s transit over the paver (I finally have that setup process figured out after three rentals). Again, I used the overhead string (and the lines etched on the paver) to orient the transit. It took us about an hour of setup before we placed our first stake, but once we did, the rest went fairly straight forward. Since most of the key points for this design are positioned radially from the center, we just needed the transit for the angles and a measuring tape for the distances. This marked out the centers of the edges, then we offset these stakes by one foot (half the width of the footing) to get the true outer corners. In one corner, we use some Pythagoras (3-4-5 triangle) to square things up. We also put a lot of “extra” stakes in to make the curved shape clearer and topped it off by tying string along the perimeter of the footings. We actually had brought surveyors paint, but it didn’t work well on the sand.
The pit had not been excavated far enough and I had to do some manual digging along the way. The soft sand was easy to dig (I did all the work barefoot and pretended I was at the beach) but as I dug, the sandy wall would cave in and give me more to dig. I couldn’t throw the dirt out of the hole, so I tried tossing it “out of the way”. But I didn’t put it “out of the way enough” and I had to dig some of the same dirt again when I got to the next stake. Sherri thought that was funny. There were a few areas that had so much sand I just gave up and stuck the stakes in about where they would be. We called the excavator to come back and widen the excavation. That was a bit disappointing because it meant we would need to delay the start of the footings. Anyway, we got it all staked out by 9:20 PM (just before it got dark), but it was probably closer to 10:30 PM before we completed the long drive back and picked up our kids (an hour and a half later than planned), so we appreciate that my in-laws were merciful and hope they will still help us out next time ;^).
Hopefully the Excavator will go back and take care of the over-dig without disturbing these stakes or the centerstone marker (paver) too much and we can get to work on the footings. I found out that my footings guy uses a “Total Station” builders transit. It has a computer that does all the trig for you. We will let him stake it out next time. I just need to figure out how to transfer my drawings into the right format.
Meanwhile, the other two guys finished leveling and switched to bending and placing rebar. They had brought a manual rebar bender/cutter, but never used it. Instead they used a concrete saw with a 12 inch grinding wheel for cutting (caution, that rebar is still hot for a long time after). All the bending was done “freehand” as needed. They did have a rebar tie gun that is 
supposed to make the job easier, and it probably did, when it wasn’t messing up, or running out of energy, and it sure used a lot of tie wire (several reels worth). I looked up the specific gun they were using and it costs $3,385 to $3,865 depending on the specific model.
efore heading out there, I had looked up the coordinates where the “concrete encased electrode” would be. This is basically using the rebar in the footing as an additional grounding rod. So I set that up, complete with the rebar grounding clamps.
