Quad-Deck is a product sold by Quad-Lock, an ICF (Insulated Concrete Forms) company. It is basically a flooring (or roofing) system that uses polystyrene as a form for concrete. The panels click together and include steel beams so they can span greater distances (with less shoring) while supporting the wet concrete. The concrete hardens to form a continuous floor over the panels and the panels are left in place as insulation.
My unique earth sheltered home design includes a basement. This increased the height of the walls holding back earth. Structurally, I needed my floor to be a sheer plane that would prevent the earth from pushing in those walls by transferring the lateral loads right thru the house into the dirt on the other side. The resulting compression would be well handled by a concrete floor. I just had to find the easiest way to build one.
I could have built a deck out of wood or steel panels supported by bracing and just poured concrete over that. There are modular systems that work pretty well and are cost effective for rectangular buildings, but my curved shape would make it quite difficult and expensive. Also, those systems generally produce a uniform concrete thickness, which adds to the expense.
ICFs had the advantage of being easy to setup and easy to trim. They also use less concrete because they can form that stronger IBeam shape. The insulation is also perfect for my in-floor radiant heating and helps with more consistent indoor temperatures and reduced sound transmission.
Unlike ICF building blocks, there are very few companies that make this sort of ICF floor system, just about the only other company with a similar product is “Lite-Deck”, but they had no distributors in my region. AMDeck is a similar product that only comes in short pieces (32 inches long) so you don’t need to order custom lengths, but you need to place the steel joists separately and then place the Insulation over them and it just seemed like more could go wrong.
The Video
The Process
1) The quad deck panels are cut to length (according to a cut sheet I provided) in the factory and shipped to the site.
2) The installers (in my case, Dan and Brian), started by setting up scaffolding spaced across the floor. Beams were placed across the scaffolding and the scaffold legs were adjusted to level the beams across the space.
3) My curved walls required both ends of every piece to be shaped to fit. This was done with a measuring tape and a saws-all. Occasionally a big cutting wheel was used.
4) Each piece was pushed up against the previous piece before being screwed in place so that they would be held tightly together. The screws were “toe-nailed” thru the wood shoring and into the steel reinforcement.
5) Spray foam was used to seal the gaps between the top edge of the wall and quad deck material.
6) Rebar was placed in the channel and across the quad deck according to the drawing. Rebar chairs were used.
7) A perimeter form, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, radiant floor PEX, etc. were added later (next post).
Surprises
In my region, it seemed like I pretty much had to go with QuadDeck if I wanted this sort of product. To make matters worse, QuadDeck only had one single installer in my region. I asked for a quote on both the quad deck and the ICF walls of the garage. The wall quote from this builder was not even in the top 3 and several times more expensive than doing FoxBlocks myself. But they were the only quote for the Quad Deck, and I thought special bracing was needed, so I decided to go with them for that portion of the build. The quote was for “Quad Deck install, labor and shoring rental.” I called for further clarification and was told it would get the quad deck ready for the pour, but did not include the actual concrete or labor to pour and finish the floor. I would need to call a separate contractor for that. The price was high, but acceptable for a company with specialty experience and equipment, so I put them in my estimate.
Later that summer, after back-filling around the basement, it was time to get the quote updated and call the crew out. I sent in pictures of the basement (including zoomed in shots of the edge of the wall), along with a cut-sheet and images from my 3D model, calculations from the QuadDeck manual (it is a pre-engineered product), etc. They updated the quote, but said they wanted an engineering stamp before they would start work.
My engineer had retired (still young, but wanted to stay home with his kids), so I contacted the builder’s engineer. He was willing to check and stamp my work and he was very affordable, but he was also very old (eighty something) and only worked face to face (no computers). I would need to take him drawings and he would hand calculate and stamp them if he approved. There was a funny telephone episode where I was asking him his address (so I could google map it), but he just kept repeating how to get to his office via landmarks. Before I could get out there (he lived 4 hours away), he had a stroke and retired. I didn’t want to pay a new engineer to learn about QuadDeck, so I began a search for someone with experience. The builder wasn’t much help. I even called quad-lock company headquarters and they just forwarded my request back to the builder. I called QuadDeck back a few times and asked for other regions until I eventually found an Engineering company in the southwest that was licensed to stamp a drawing in Michigan. It ended up adding a surprise $1200 to my estimated cost, but may have saved me some money because my version would have used twice as much rebar (I was being conservative with the Quad Deck load calculations).
I still couldn’t schedule the builder to come out. I tried to go around him, but it turned out he was also the only builder in the surrounding 4 states. He had a monopoly and ran his business that way.
Eventually, we got the quad deck panels ordered. I knew it would take weeks for my order to be cut and then delivered. They were supposed to call me with a delivery time 24 hours in advance so I could organize to unload. Instead I got an annoyed call from the driver at 6:00 in the morning wondering why there was no one at the building site. Surprise, my 10-year-old and I hopped in my car and drove the hour out to the property, but there was no way to organize any other help in that short time. When I got there a little after 7:00 AM, there was a large 18 wheeler trailer full of QuadDeck planks waiting for me. It was the closed in kind with big double doors at the back, so I could not unload with my fork lift. The panels were stacked to the roof and would need to be removed by hand, slid out one at a time. I had to get a 13 ft ladder just to reach the panels. The driver was impatient, so David and I got to work without setting up the camera. The driver complained that we were taking too long, so I told him that he could have called to let us know he was coming (as he was supposed to do) or he could help. He helped a little with a couple of pieces that David could not physically lift, but generally speaking, he just paced back and forth. Eventually we got them all out of the truck and the driver shook David’s hand before he left. I think he was impressed with David, but was also still pretty annoyed with me for not having a real crew.
We used the SkidSteer to move the blocks up behind the house and stacked them and covered them with a tarp… And then waited. Every few weeks, the builder made up some excuse and moved the date back. The list of back and forth texts is quite ridiculous. Eventually, 3 months later, he said he would be able to slot me in before the end of Sept (one week away). He asked if I had the rebar on site, I did. He asked if I had the full list of building materials he needed… I had no idea what he was talking about. He sent me a list, which added up to $1700. Surprise! The list included 4×6 beams, 35 lbs worth of screws, 3/4 inch plywood, 2x4s, 2x6s, a case of spray foam, anchor bolts, etc. I called him and asked if he was planning to build the shoring? I was obviously annoyed, which annoyed him and he said we could just call off the whole thing and I could look for another builder.
Of course, I already had the material on site and he knew he was the only builder within 1000 miles that had ever installed this stuff before… I gave in and we proceeded. He then told me that his quote did not include the perimeter forms that would also be needed before we poured, but he could do that for an extra cost. I was so annoyed, I didn’t even want to discuss the extra costs or argue that he never mentioned this before, so I told him I would take care of that myself.
I asked how many days it would take for what was included in the quote, he said 6 or 7 days for a crew of 3 people.
Anyway, as you can see from the video, it took 1 day just to set up the shoring (which turned out to be regular scaffolding and my 4×6 beams, leveled). Then 2 days to put in the quad deck. There was also a short 4th day of just a couple of hours when they finished the quad deck off and were gone by 9:00 AM to work on pouring some other wall somewhere else. Then the last day was just putting in rebar and spray foaming. The main boss never even made it out to the property.
After the job was done, he sent a final bill that included about 2000$ extra costs for “unexpected extra work” including putting in rebar and spray foam and “gasoline for the generator”, etc. I was sick of the surprises and fought him on most of it. He kept asking me to “meet him half way”. Instead I went thru my emails, texts and time-stamped-timelapse photos and wrote up what could easily have been a trial defense. For instance, I pointed out that he had estimated 7 days for 3 people, but got the job done in 4 days with mostly 2 people, how could he justify “extra costs”? He eventually gave in on most of the bogus extra charges, but still got his “36$ for gasoline for the generator”. I just wanted to move on.
Then he hit me with the scaffold rental. He wanted several thousand for that. I told him that his quote said “labor and scaffold rental”. He said that was just the first 2 weeks, I had kept the scaffolding for 3 weeks longer than that to finish getting it ready for pour and then leaving the scaffolding in for 2 weeks while the floor set. He wanted $15 per unit for those 3 weeks. I eventually agreed, but then he defined the units as half sets (so twice the cost). Arg! long story short, I ended up paying an additional 810$ to rent that scaffolding for 3 weeks. For perspective, I paid $1200 to buy my other 5 sets of scaffolding, and that included 6 decks, 8 wheels, outriggers, a grouser bar, etc.
Anyway, as much as I liked the idea of QuadDeck, I would never work with that builder again. I have some quad deck left for the roof of the mezzanine. I plan to install it myself.
Bonus fun facts…
1) The scaffolding that I rented has been stacked nicely and ready for pickup for almost 4 months with no responses to my monthly texts to the builder to come and pick ’em up. You will see it in the background of various other videos ;^) It was actually quite labor intensive to remove it from the basement (next video), so I hope the builder appreciates that that free labor. I wonder if I could surprise him with storage fees?
2) At the end of each day, the guys did a great job cleaning up the site. They used a leaf mulcher to suck up and bag the little broken bits of Styrofoam so they wouldn’t blow all over the place and they carefully stacked the other trash.
Cost
The original quote was about 4$/sqft for quad deck materials. That turned into 6$ by the time we placed the order (including freight). Then another $7/sqft for labor and shoring rental. I also budgeted about $1 for rebar and 2$ for concrete, plus 3$ for labor to pour and finish the floor. Then I had the surprise of just over 1$ for engineering plus just under 2$ for extra materials (some of which I was able to return unused and much of which I will reuse elsewhere in the build). Then, finally, that ridiculous “additional” scaffold rental at the end, which divided out to just under 1$/sqft. That comes to about ~22$/sqft by the time we were done. Quite a bit over-budget, but survivable.
The first week back at school, my son had to write about what he did over the summer. I figured it should go on the website. ~Simon
This summer I built my house. For the last ten years my dad has been planning the design of my new house, and last year we started construction! For the last year we have been building our new house. You want to hear something really cool? It’s an underground house!
This summer I’ve worked so much and spent many Saturdays at construction. It’s very exhausting, but there are some parts I have enjoyed though. These include pouring the cement; we do this in areas such as the downstairs floor, the walls of the basement, and the garage back wall.
Making arches is fun too! To make the arches, we use the molds that my dad made and pour cement into them. The next day we take off the molds and there are nicely made arches waiting for us to polish and make cool patterns on. So far we have six out of eleven done and only two of them half way polished, while the others haven’t even been smoothed yet!
Another thing that is super fun is when my mom needs me to climb up on top of the bedroom frame to tie wires so that it is ready for cement to get poured inside the frame. I really enjoy climbing high and it’s really cool how you can observe everything below you.
My favorite thing to do is to find frogs and turtles. The basement isn’t covered up yet, so lots of frogs and baby snapping turtles fall in and die. Each day I try to find and catch every frog and turtle I can before they dry up. I have to shovel out their dead bodies. The most I have saved in one day was ten frogs and two turtles.
During the summer, I also enjoyed swimming in my grandparents’ pool. I played at the park, visited museums, and I also played at my friends’ houses. The greatest thing I did this summer though was building my house.
You may recall that we had steel arches rolled (curved with big rolling wheels) into arches. However, these arches needed legs welded to them. They also needed a way to fasten them to the footing and a way for them to hold rebar.
The first two of those ideas are looked at in this video. Details and how we attached the rebar are included in this post…
The Video
Welding the arches
The steel fabricators that rolled my arches are also expert welders (among other things). I did get a quote to weld the arches together, but it was $6000, and that was just for the 30 arches on the bedroom side (not the other arches in the radial vaults). That is about 100$ per leg welded on, or, assuming 4 welds per leg, 25$ per weld… And that doesn’t even weld the arches to the feet or attach any rebar. I assumed the quote meant that they wanted me to learn to weld, so I bought a cheapwelder on Craigs list (a couple hundred bucks got me fully setup) and practiced so I could do it myself.
The arches arrived on site in early may. All the half circles had been cut to 180 degrees. Some of the larger ones were actually segmented in 2 or 3 pieces so they could more easily be delivered. The Elliptical arches were not trimmed (I would need to use my template).
My sister came out to help and we spent the morning practicing and getting the settings right on the welder. When it came time to weld the real arches, we first needed to assemble the pieces together and we needed the legs to be parallel. We did this by setting things up with equal diagonals and then building a brace jig, like a truss, to keep things aligned correctly. The jig took a few extra minutes to build, but we had a number of arches of each size, so we were able to re-use it and save a lot of time later.
Early in the welding, we were very serious and wore all the gear and clamped the jig on again after flipping the arch to weld the bottom… By the end, I stopped wearing the jacket, switched back to sandals and didn’t worry about the jig after the initial welds were in. Actually, not wearing all the protection helped train me to be a better welder. There is nothing like hot metal burns to teach you how to weld without sputtering.
I did, however, keep wearing the gloves. I found the best way to weld was to old the gun with both hands and to rest one of them on the work to stead the gun. The other hand could then control the gun with good fine motion control.
I also learned the importance of keeping that shielding gas concentrated around the work and how sensitive the welds were to the settings on the welder. If the wire speed was too fast or two slow, welding became difficult, and experience taught me to quickly realize that I needed to adjust the settings up or down for the conditions.
Along the way, a number of people stopped by to try their hands and welding. Only one of them had any prior experience (and he taught me a thing or two).
My 10 year old also got a few good welds in.
Of course, I ended up doing most of the welding by myself. I could weld and move the small arches; but larger arches were very awkward (and just a little bit heavy), so I relied on my wife, Sherri, to help move them. At one point, Sherri tripped (on a piece of rebar) and lowered the arch as she caught her self, but the welds were still hot, so she got a nice burn on her shoulder. We gave the steel lots of time to cool after that. I started staging things so that instead of welding all the arches of the same size in a series (where I would need to move arches between each set of welds), I would weld a set of “nesting” arches (of various sizes) that I could weld all at once and leave on the ground until Sherri could come out to help me flip them all.
Steel arch bases
As I have said before, my best example for this sort of construction is “Formworks.” Check out their Facebook page for lots of great pictures. These guys have lots of experience and they know how to make the process doable for the do-it-yourself market. They have features like brackets that you bolt to the ground and then the steel arches fit into them and are bolted in place. They also have Z clips pre-welded to the sides of the arches so you can easily place rebar and just hammer the clip to lock it in. The catch is that all this convenience comes at a steep price. I needed to come up with a much more cost effective way to get the job done.
I considered buying scaffold feet (as I had for the tower columns), but they were about 5$ each and would need to be bolted down with 4 bolts in 4 drilled holes. That would mean careful alignment and lots of time drilling.
If I stripped the requirements down, I needed 2 things. 1) a bearing surface to spread the weight of the steel out so it wouldn’t penetrate the footing. 2) a vertical pin to keep the leg of the arch from moving laterally. There was no need to prevent rotation, so i really only needed one hole, and there was no need to prevent lift, so I didn’t actually even need to bolt the feet down.
My final solution was just a 4×4 inch steel plate, 3/16ths of an inch thick, with a hole in it. I would use a piece of scrap rebar as a pin to keep the plate and the steel arch in place. I got quotes on getting these made and was told hundreds of dollars. I forget the exact ridiculous number, but it worked out to nearly $8 dollars per drilled hole. So I decided I would take care of this myself. The savings would pay off my drill press for the second time.
To position and assemble these bases, I drilled a single 4 inch deep hole in the footing and put an 8 inch long piece of scrap rebar thru the hole in the plate and into the hole in the footing. I then welded the rebar to the steel plate with 3 tack welds. I didn’t grout or epoxy or bolt anything. To set the arch, I would simply put the end of the steel tube over the rebar, adjust the location a bit and then weld it to the metal plate.
This solution was cheap to make, and quick and easy to install. The only catch was that I needed to weld each connection… This is a pic of a place where three of these bases were near eachother, so I used a “double” plate and welded it to the adjacent “single”.
Attaching the horizontal rebar
Placing vertical rebar is easy, you just drill a hole in the ground. Attaching horizontal rebar to smooth steel tubes is harder. If you tie it, it may just slide down. Welding everything in place as you go would probably be too time consuming and would require more hands than I usually have.
I decided to try and find a cheaper way to replicate the basic idea of the Formworks Z brackets. I started by looking at prices of various channel steel that would work. As usual, buying actual raw materials is not the cheapest way. I found that I could get steel shelving pieces (made in China) for the best price. I would just cut them into 3/4 inch slices and weld them to the frames myself.
I prepared about 5 of these, but when I added up the cost of materials and my time (at only 10$ an hour) for slicing and grinding down the excessively sharp edges, they came to about $0.50 each. And that didn’t even include the time to weld them to the frames and I would have hundreds of these.
Another idea was to weld S hooks to the sides of the frames so that one side of the hook could catch the rebar. I bought a few of these for about $0.25 each, but couldn’t find a good bulk price. I found that they were easy to weld in place, but the opening was a bit tight and I would need to hammer them open a bit to better receive the rebar.
Then I decided I could just buy a big box of nails ($0.01 each) and weld those on at an angle to catch the rebar. Then I could just hammer those over to hold the rebar firmly in place. But the welding task was still daunting and my wife thought they created a real hazard on the job site. “You’ll poke your eye out kid.”
Then I decided to break it down to its simplest concept. I couldn’t just wire the rebar to the smooth vertical steel tubes because it would just slide down. All I needed to do was stop the sliding. I decided to notch the steel with my grinder. I made the notches every foot (my horizontal rebar spacing) and made sure that the tie wire caught the notch… Problem solved. The cost was very small (one $2 disk could make all the notches for the project) and no welding was required. Actually, my friend Aaron brought me a 10 pack of metal cutoff disks that he had for some reason, so it was all free to me.
Mistakes were made
Perhaps in my misguided effort to be a good host, I made a few mistakes by setting up a few early arches without first carefully laying out the locations of all the arches. This meant that my first few arches were welded in place before I noticed that I had some how made a 5 degree error in placing the first one… I ended up “adjusting” the other base locations to try and sort out the locations, and it will all work out, but without the crisp straight lines that I originally thought I wanted.
German vs Spanish
Online, you can find many examples of “German” earth shelters where the construction is very precisely planed out and executed. Even if they have “free form” shapes, they are constructed very precisely to the specified forms. You can also find many “Spanish” examples (including many in Germany ;^) where the builders basically hand formed the rebar arches as they went, perhaps based on some rough sketches, and ended up with a much more organic free-form design.
I had started this build with a more “German” ideal in mind. I used Marino Ware studs to get perfectly vertical walls. I had the steel arches rolled by professionals to exacting specifications. The design its self was very euclidean geometric so that I could precisely work out all the angles.
But as it is going up, small mistakes (mine and others) and approximations are adding up and it is becoming more and more “Spanish”. My epiphany was when I realized that this was because I was the one making many of the approximations, and that, perhaps, I was a bit “Spanish” in my construction. I also decided that it will still all work out, even if it ends up looking a bit more organic rather than purely geometric.
Next Post
In the next post, we will finish erecting the steel arches and start putting up rebar. I just couldn’t fit it all in to one video/post
1) The quad deck panels are cut to length (according to a cut sheet I provided) in the factory and shipped to the site.
1) The scaffolding that I rented has been stacked nicely and ready for pickup for almost 4 months with no responses to my monthly texts to the builder to come and pick ’em up. You will see it in the background of various other videos ;^) It was actually quite labor intensive to remove it from the basement (next video), so I hope the builder appreciates that that free labor. I wonder if I could surprise him with storage fees?
The original quote was about 4$/sqft for quad deck materials. That turned into 6$ by the time we placed the order (including freight). Then another $7/sqft for labor and shoring rental. I also budgeted about $1 for rebar and 2$ for concrete, plus 3$ for labor to pour and finish the floor. Then I had the surprise of just over 1$ for engineering plus just under 2$ for extra materials (some of which I was able to return unused and much of which I will reuse elsewhere in the build). Then, finally, that ridiculous “additional” scaffold rental at the end, which divided out to just under 1$/sqft. That comes to about ~22$/sqft by the time we were done. Quite a bit over-budget, but survivable.
