Tag Archives: Footings

Prepping the garage slab

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Posted on September 27, 2014 by

The Video:

My time-lapse camera is pretty basic and has a manual focus.  I had it set to 8ft instead of ∞.  Easy mistake ;^).  But here is the slightly out of focus video anyway.

The Story:

I was not able to be on site when the crew setup the formwork and rebar for the garage slab.  When I did see it, I realized it would need to be redone.  Engineering had been done by 2 different engineers…  The first was the engineer that I had hired to do the entire project.  He specified rebar every 24 inches across the slab.  The engineer from SteelMaster specified 6×6 WWR (welded wire reinforcement).  I decided to do both.  The guys who assembled the footings were only looking at one of the drawings, so they just put down the WWR. In addition to adding rebar, I wanted to add a vapor barrier, rigid insulation and radiant floor pex also…

First, I waited for the plumbers to come and do their work roughing in the garage bathroom.  While they were working, I removed the large sheets of welded wire reinforcing and bent 40 peices of repar to put into place.  After the plumbers were done their work, I tried laying it all out myself.  However, I soon realized that positioning 16×8 ft sheets of welded wire is really a two man job.  I decided to phone a friend.  Aaron was willing to give me a hand early Saturday morning.

We started by excavating away a couple inches of sand in the areas where we planned to place the rigid insulation.  At nearly 27$ per sheet, I didn’t want to insulate the whole slab, but I did want warmer feet in the bathroom and workshop areas.

We cut and laid the insulation carefully around the plumbing for the bathroom. And then in an “L” shape where my workbench would be…

Then we unrolled a 20ft wide sheet of 6mil poly to use as a vapor barrier under the slab and under the footing all the way around.  Here, we are lifting the rebar in the footing to get the plastic underneath it.

The poly sheet was 20’ wide, so we had to do this in two overlapping pieces… Which Aaron taped together.

Initially, we had rebar chairs down the middle, but they were too tall so we had to remove them later.

I measured out and marked the 24 inch intervals for the rebar using surveyors paint.

Then we laid the rebar, using small bits of insulation as spacers.  We put the 6×6 WWR on top of that.

Lastly, I brought out some pex pipe for future radiant floor heating…  The pex was much longer than I needed for the bathroom, so I made a last minute decision to swing a loop out past my workbench…  I secured it to the Welded Wire Reinforcement ever few feet.

The last thing that needed fixing was the wooden board that had been put in place as a keyway for the quonset hut.  It had been installed too shallow and had been put in the wrong place (even though I had clearly marked where it should go).  We decided to let the experts fix that mistake on the day of the pour.

The Mistakes

  • Perhaps I should have excavated a bit more before placing the rigid insulation. It seemed OK at the time, but after adding spacers, rebar, WWR and radiant tubing, I wished I had it an inch deeper.
  • I may regret adding the pex loop thru the shop… It may end up making it difficult for me to heat that bathroom adequately without also wasting heat in the shop.
  • I only tied off the pex every few feet. But later, when we added the concrete, many sections floated to the surface.  The crew pushed it back down again, but then later they didn’t want to cross cut the back half of the shop.  Of course, cracks formed along  where the PEX tube was too close to the surface.

Forming the main floor footings

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Posted on September 22, 2014 by

The Video

You can find the video here:

The Story

The day started early, with the site mostly staked from the previous day (that video was not very interesting, so I won’t bother posting it)…

But we still needed to place a few more stakes, so as the morning fog cleared, Sherri and I finished what we had started.

We were in a rush, so our precision was not the best, but the footings are 2 ft wide and the wall is only 6 inches wide, so we just wanted to get things within an inch or so (further fudging happened when the forms were actually placed, I hope it all works out)…

The guys from Dysert Concrete arrived and started working on forming the garage while we finished up the stakes on the south side of the house.

The garage perimeter required about 200 linear feet of boards.  The plan is to pour the garage footing and floor at once (sometimes called a thickened edge slab).  The perimeter is 2 ft thick and 18 inches deep (shallow frost protected footings), but the middle is only a 4 inch thick slab.  So we would need to dig trenches around the perimeter and then also backfill and tamp down the middle.

2014-09-17_FootingsPrep

The rest of the house looks curvy, but actually it only needed 350 ft of curved boards and 400 ft of straight boards.  They used 2x12s for the straight boards and the flexible ones are half inch thick lap siding.  Actually, it seems like modern builders only use lap siding for curved forms, never for actual siding. The bedroom side of the house is mostly straight boards, with curves on the end and back (against the earth).

People assume the curves add to the cost, but actually, the lap siding costs much less than the 2x12s and the curved walls resist the earth loads better, allowing me to use 1/3rd the thickness and less reinforcement.

2014-09-18_CurvyForms

These are just the footings.  Basically, the walls will sit on them and it will help to distribute the loads so the house doesn’t sink into the sand.  They will end up one foot below the floor and will never be seen in the final house, so the exact angles and curves don’t really matter that much.  So, when the inside radius of the bedroom apse was just too tight to curve the lap siding board without breaking it, we just went with piecewise linear…

As they started leveling the tops of the footings, it became clear that we would need bring up the ground level a little, especially on the bedroom wing side of the house…  I used my skidsteer to dump some sand near the right places.

The next day, they continued with leveling the forms and moving sand around to meet it.  I actually needed to get a bit more sand for them.  They use a builders level to set the boards to the right height and then screw them to the stakes.  After the boards are screwed to the outside stakes, they can remove the inside ones.  Then they push sand up against the outside of the forms to help resist the lateral force of the concrete.  It worked in most areas, but it later became clear that they should have used more stakes in some areas to prevent the concrete from moving the boards.

After leveling, they ran the tamper thru the area to pack it all down so it won’t settle later…  Then they set the rebar chairs (that will keep the rebar out of the dirt).  At this point, we had an issue because they had brought 6 inch rebar chairs because they assumed I would want the rebar in the middle of the footing. But since most of the tension would be in bottom of the footing, I needed them to push those chairs half way into the ground.

Eventually, they cut, curved and placed about 2000 ft of rebar.  Actually, I had ordered much more rebar than I needed because I figured I would use it eventually.  I was very happy to be able to use my SkidSteer to unload the two large bundles from the top of the truck.  I am sure Doug’s guys were also happy that they didn’t have to unload it.

2014-09-24_FormswRebar

The Mistakes…

As per usual, I am sure I made a number of mistakes.  Many will become known as I move ahead with the project, but I know of at least a couple already.

  • I was busy working that day. I was short on vacation days and only took half the first day off and none of the second day.  This means I couldn’t guide the crew.  Instead, they relied on my stakes.  I had placed the stakes fairly carefully, hopefully within an inch or so of where they should end up, but the guys simply measured off the stakes and cut boards without concern about matching lengths or square angles.  If I had walked with them, I could have said “this board is 6’9” long and so is the one opposite…”   It would have resulted in a more accurate footing…    On the other hand, the footing will be buried and doesn’t need to be perfect to distribute the load adequately.   There was actually a 3rd day, but I couldn’t make it out to the property at all that day and they really didn’t understand what was needed for the garage footing, to the point that we had to redo it (fortunately, I did not have to pay by the hour).
  • My plans were changed by an outside force and I didn’t properly adjust my 3D model or work thru all the ramifications. The change started when the basement was dug and we excavated a wider area than I expected.  This caused the inspector to require that I added those pilasters to help support the footings that spanned the backfill.  We also made a change so that the garage floor and footings were poured at once, and therefore the top of the garage footing was the same level as the final floor.  And since I needed the footing to sit on top of the basement wall, I put the mud room footings at the higher level all the way across from the garage to where they sit on the pilasters.  I thought about how this would affect the concrete rib that will sit on that footing (I will need it to be a foot shorter than the others.) but forgot that it would also affect how the floor is poured and would also complicate how I insulate that footing.  Oh well, I will deal with that when I get to that point.

Our most expensive date ever!

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Posted on June 25, 2014 by

This afternoon, my wife and I had our most expensive date ever! 

We closed on our construction loan!

Getting this loan was a long and painful process that involved an appraiser, our insurance lady (that we ended up dumping because she was messing everything up) and a few other big surprises.  I plan to document more at a later date, but here are the basics of what happened recently.

Last week, we had asked for an updated estimate of the closing costs.  Of course, there were all the usual “fees”, including flood inspection, etc.  The biggest of the recent surprises was that the bank wanted us to deposit all the money we planned to use, up front, in their account, so they could manage the disbursements and make sure it all goes into the construction.  The difference with this latest update was that the bank added 10% more to cover “unexpected costs”.  This was a significant jump that had not been included in previous discussions (they had been willing to accept that I had built safety factors into each line item).  We scrambled to figure out how to scratch together the additional money (imagine suddenly needing to find 10% of the cost to build your home).

PiggyBankStressedWe could have swung it, but I was worried about our shrinking liquidity (I still need to buy tools, rent equipment, etc. and those costs are not covered by the construction loan).  We ended up deciding to take some money out of our retirement savings plan.  We will need to start paying it back to ourselves immediately (it starts coming out of my next pay check) or face a tax penalty, but the interest rate (to ourselves) was good and there were no significant fees.  It was actually a pretty painless process and we put the paperwork together in about 20 minutes (Sherri and I working together).  We took a bit more than we thought we needed, just in case.  That check arrived yesterday.

 

OverwhelmedPaperwork_323x210Today started with Sherri still up from the night before going over the receipts that we have already paid.  I gave up and went to bed at midnight, but I assume she checked everything more than twice more (as is her nature). These receipts are required to support our “Sworn Statement” that says how much we have paid and how much we have left to pay.

We showed up for our lunch time appointment at the bank today with a big accordion-folder worth of paperwork.

The first biggest surprise was that we were expected to pay off the remaining mortgage on our land before the new loan would commence.  I had thought our land may come up since the appraisal was based on the house and land and I figured it may occur to the bank that they had already loaned us something, but I thought they would take the money out of what they were going to loan us now.  Instead it was added up front as closing costs before the other loan would go through.  Ouch.  Good thing we had more in the account that we thought we needed.  But this is a significant cut to our liquidity.

The silver lining is that we now own the land outright and no longer have that land payment.  Also, the new mortgage percentage went down a bit from the last estimate, so in the end, our payment is very reasonable (over 30% lower than we thought it would be for the house and land payments combined).

We spent over an hour signing papers.  Sherri is very thorough and likes to read everything; she found a number of mistakes, including her name spelled wrong several ways on a single page.  The lady at the bank had to make a number of runs back upstairs to reprint documents with corrections.  She was getting a bit tired by the end of it.

Eventually we got through it all and the Earth Sheltered Umbrella Home is fully funded.

Sourcing

I finally got the bill for the footings today.  It was a volume plus materials sort of deal, so I was a bit nervous about how the cost of materials would add up.  However, it did seem reasonable.  I am not thrilled about all the unused forming supplies that I bought.  I hope they don’t get wrecked by the weather before we can use them on the main floor footings (I have them covered with 6mil plastic at the moment).  The cost of the concrete was 6% lower than expected and the giant pump truck was 14% lower than expected.  Unfortunately, the rebar and other steel was 17% higher than expected, probably due to that 18% bump in the price of steel over the past year.   Overall, we are still on budget.

26 ft tower and internal stair clamp 001I also purchased a new 26ft tall scaffold tower today.  I had been trying to get a used one.  There were not many to choose from and most looked like rusty pieces of junk.  The worst part was they were priced only 30% below new.  I found one nice aluminum one for a reasonable price, but I called the guy and he had sold it for scrap.  In the end, I needed one next week, so I decided to pay a little more and get a brand new one, and that was for a “delux” model with the extra wide outriggers and other safety features.  It should arrive the middle of next week along with my steel studs (which were originally supposed to arrive last Friday).  I should be able to sell it at the end of construction for a reasonable price.

I had also been looking at buying turnbuckles to help me plumb the steel stud walls (tricky because I don’t have a top track to attach to).  I was looking at the sort of thing that ICF installer’s use to straighten and plumb their walls before a pour.  I found them to be very expensive, so I designed my own and priced it out.  I figure I can make equivalent hardware for less than 1/10th the price of buying them.  The only catch is that I will need to buy that MIG welder sooner, but I planned to get it for the main floor steel anyway.

I have a 25% off coupon for a nice MIG welder (another thing I couldn’t find second hand), and will probably pick that up this weekend.

Construction Birds

Some of you may have caught my video on the river swallows at the construction site…  Here it is anyway.

Eye Candy

Yes, time for some eye candy.