Rebar and lath for the bedrooms

Last year, we got started on the steel structure.  This year (2016), we got all the rebar and lath up in preparation for shotcrete.  First, the video…  Then some info, but mostly a larger picture gallery than usual.

The Video

Details

Statistics

This process took from 2016-05-05 to 2016-07-26, so nearly 12 weeks of the calendar.  Of course we also worked on other things during that time (such as the garage which will be a separate video). Specific to this bedroom wing, we worked (at least for a couple hours) on 26 different days.  The time-lapse camera (which I ran pretty faithfully) recorded 77,653 images.  At one every 5 seconds, that means it was running for 388k seconds, or 107 hours.  If we divided that into 8 hour days, it comes to about 13.5 days.  About half the time, I was there by myself, 1/4 of the time with Sherri, and the last quarter Sherri and I had other help (Hunter, John, Bonnie, Joe & Jessica (my parents), Dan, Ethan and the plumbers).

If I had turned all 77,653 images into video at 29.97 frames per second, it would have been a little over 43 minutes of video.  I edited that down to under 10 minutes (less than 1/4).  In some cases, I edited out scenes, in others (such as that last interior wall), I just ran the speed of the video up to x900.  You are welcome ;^)

Rebar Chairs

We added rebar chairs to stiffen up the assembly and prevent “bounce”.

It is important to leave some space between the rebar and the lath for the concrete to completely encase the rebar.  To achieve this, we made sure to tie the lath on loosely (leave room for a couple fingers).  this works pretty well for the roof because the weight of the concrete will push the lath down and away from the rebar, but no further than the wire ties.  However, in the walls, the concrete can “bounce” the lath and then fall off the wall.  After seeing my setup, the shotcrete guy asked me to stiffen up the walls by adding rebar chairs where the lath was bouncy…  I had these chairs left over from the quad deck floor and they worked perfectly.

Welding

Welding was great because it really stiffens up the assembly so you can climb it without fear… and it actually doesn’t take much longer than tying.  In many cases, I just tied enough to keep the bars in place and pull any wide intersections close enough to weld.  Then I would just weld the rest of the connections much faster than I could have tied them.

The downside to welding is that the heat can actually change the properties of the steel and make it more brittle if you try to bend against the weld…  However, in my case, the welds are really just there to keep the steel in place long enough to pour the concrete.  After that, it is really the concrete that keeps the steel together (and vice versa).  My welds are intentionally shallow, just enough to tack the pieces together without significantly weakening the rebar.

You may find some places have building codes against welding rebar, but if you read them more carefully, they are really talking about cleaning that surface crud off the steel.  You get that sort of thing with arc welding, but not with the MIG welder that I use.  But in any case, there are no such rules for residential construction where I am building.

Curving Rebar

When you curve rebar, it is always trickier to curve the first and last couple feet.  But the middle curves pretty easily.  So, I usually curve the full 20 ft long pieces and then cut the nice continuous curve into as many pieces as I can get.   If the piece has a 5 ft straight wall before the curve, then I just start curving the rebar 5 ft from the end.  I usually start by “over curving” the steel a little bit and then straighten it out to get the final radius that I want.

Gallery

Here is a gallery of pics.  Some are just as people started or moved the go pro time lapse camera. Others are just candid pics that went by too fast in the timelapse.  There are also occasional cell phone pics in there also.  Thanks to everyone who came out to help.

 

 

Running Septic Lines

We needed to hook up the septic side lines to run from the bedrooms and garage to the main central line coming from under the basement.  The original plan had these running under the house, but the plumber suggested that it would be much easier to run the line outside the house completely…  At some later point, we also decided to run the bedroom electrical along this outside line.  Of course, this all required some digging.  Gota love that nice soft sand.

The Video

Some details

The Stack:

The bedroom septic line had a further run and needed to be below frost depth, so it connected at a lower point on the stack.  Then I connected the garage line at a higher point.  However, I thought it would be a good idea to slope it more and get deeper than I had to…  Some plumbers say that you shouldn’t slope too much because the solids and liquids will separate and you will have clogging problems.  I have done my research and determined that was not true (just a plumbers wives’ tale) so I didn’t mind sloping it more.  However, after making the stack connection with the Y-pipe shown in the video, I decided that I didn’t like the angle of the connection.  Basically, these pipes are designed to connect at closer to perpendicular or maybe 5 degrees off.  My original connection was maybe 20 degrees off.  It was probably sealed, but it didn’t look great and I didn’t want to take any chances.  I ended up cutting off that Y-connection and extending the stack so i could connect at a higher point with less slope.

The Shortcut:

The plumbing and the electrical in the bedroom wing both connect in the laundry room, very close to eachother so they can exit from the same hole and follow the same trench…  However, I didn’t measure conservatively enough and although the electrical cables could reach the panel, I was worried about being a few inches short of making final connections, so we ended up digging a short cut trench for the electrical cables. At least we could still re-use about 2/3rds of the trench.

The Electrical cables:

Earlier, I had experimented with other kinds of cable, running thru conduit. This time I was using cable that was certified to be directly buried.  It was still in conduit where it came out of the garage (because it is not certified to be encased in concrete and because I didn’t want a potential leak above the floor anyway), but then came out of the conduit below the footings level.  I basically wired it according to above ground code with the required depth below the footing and bushings, etc. After burial, it will only further exceed code.

Gallery

Just some pics…

Quad Deck, Part 2

Summary

After the Quad Deck ICFs were installed, there was still a lot of work to do before we could pour concrete, and then still a bit of work after.

Before we could pour, we had to install the pex tube for the radiant floors, build a perimeter form to hold in the concrete, put in plumbing, electrical conduit and duct work, and generally clean up any mess from the previous steps.

While we had the pump truck there, I also wanted to pour a couple 7 ft tall columns, so we also prepped those.  We also poured a section of ICF wall, but I will save that for another post…

After it was all over, we had to remove all the forms.  We gave the concrete a couple weeks to cure (and gain strength) and then we removed the scaffolding and shoring.

PostPour

Video

You can find the Video here:

Experienced workers and new technology

Pour_01They workers are used to pouring concrete on stable ground, so they were quite nervous about pouring on the ICF forms.  They started out walking very carefully and there was a lot of nervous laughter.  I made sure to pass along the pour instructions I had received from the Quad Deck installers. After the grooves were filled, the guys appeared to forget what they were standing on and began stomping around as usual.  We had no problems with the Quad Deck system.  Everything held up and there was only a little bleed water in the basement.

The blow out

During the column pour, the weight/lateral pressure of the concrete blew out the forms.  To be clear, these were my column forms, that I built, not the Quad deck forms.  My heart sunk as concrete spilled into the basement.

Next thing I knew, the guys from Dysert concrete, who were working on finishing the slab, jumped into action and helped strap the form and re-level it.  This was really going the extra mile because they were really only there to look after the floor.  They also went another extra mile and helped me scoop some concrete out of the basement.  When it was all over and guys were packing up, I tried to give them some cash for their extra efforts, but they wouldn’t take it. If you are in the SE Michigan area, I recommend these guys.

Pour_08_ColumnsIn contrast, the pump truck operator (not my usual guy who is very helpful, so I won’t blame the company), clearly did not want to be there. He was grouchy from the start, perhaps not a morning person?  When the floor was finishing up and I told him the columns were next, he complained a lot because he thought he was only there for the floor.  He threatened to charge me extra.  At that point, we were not even half way thru the minimum 4 hour window that I had to pay for.  Also, I had specified (in writing) the volume of concrete and listed the columns and the ICF wall when I booked the truck.  I didn’t bother arguing all these details with the driver, but I simply ignored his threat and told him it needed to be done before he could pack up.

Amateur legal note:  If a contractor tries to change the price part way thru a job without sufficient justification, you can safely ignore the threat.  Legally, if it would be even more expensive to switch contractors at that point, the threat of a work stoppage amounts to extortion and puts you in financial duress to agree with their unjustified price increase. In this case, I didn’t verbally agree to the extra charge, but I did tell him to continue on, which could be considered implicit agreement.  However, even if I had agreed verbally, or in writing, I would still be able to contest the extra charges in court later due to financial duress making the amended agreement invalid.  In order to increase the cost mid project on a fixed bid, the contractor would need to prove that the scope of the work increased significantly beyond a reasonable expectation.  For instance, my septic field guys found a 1940’s garbage dump almost as soon as they started digging.  The health department got involved and ended up raising the cost of the installation by about 30%, which I agreed to and paid without an argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the columns failed, he was even more annoyed at the extra delay and kept saying he had another job to get to.  I reminded him that he had been there less than half the minimum time I was paying for.  A moment later, he started dumping concrete on the sand, we suspect it was intentional so he could leave. Sherri got mad and yelled at him until he stopped. However, as a result of the waste (intentional or otherwise), we did not have enough concrete to finish the ICF blocks in the north wall, but that is another story.

This pic is just one the time-lapse caught as I was moving the camera.  It shows Sherri trying to clear the dumped/wasted concrete off the footings.  Definitely not princess work, but I never asked her to do it…  I was running too much to even think about it, but she separated it into smaller piles that I could move after it hardened, so I am glad she did.

DCIM379GOPRO

Friends

 

AaronYou can see that a few of my friends in this and other videos and in the gallery below.  Some of them actually like this sort of work, others come out and help anyway.  I appreciate them all.

Working with friends makes the work go faster and the day fly by.  Some of them have also taught me some good tricks based on their respective experience, or mentioned tools that would make the job easier. I will definitely have to have a big party when this thing is all done.

Pex connections

LeakingSharkBiteIn the video, you might have caught that the pressure test dial didn’t hold the pressure when I filled it.  I ended up using some dish soap from the camper to find the leaks.  I had one easily fixed leak in the manifold, but most of the trouble was with the Shark Bite connections.  Basically, I had not left enough extra length to reach down to my manifold (oops), so I needed to connect some short bits to make the final stretch.  The SharkBite connectors are individually expensive, but easy to use without any tools, and I only needed a handful.  However, try as I might, I couldn’t stop some of them from leaking.  I talked to the plumbers (who use Pex for everything) and they said they prefer the crimp connections.  I figured I would eventually be putting in a bunch more radiant, so I decided to spend the money on the crimp tool and it easily sorted out my issues.

Fibonacci Spiral

Fibonacci_01I had long planned to insert 1 ft long glass rods thru the Quad deck to let light thru in both directions.  When it came to the layout, I went with the points of a simple Fibonacci spiral, centered in the room and leading around to a spiral stair case around the corner.  Later, I can etch or mosaic in the actual curve if I want to.

These are sorts of fun little extras that make building your own home fun.

To keep the glass rods from being pushed thru the floor by the workers stepping on them, I screwed boards up underneath to hold the bottoms in place.  This is why the lights turn off just before the pour in the video.

Fibonacci_00

 

Rented Scaffolding

IMG_20151031_170822546 (Medium)The scaffolding that I rented has been stacked nicely and ready for pickup for more than 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, so I hope the builder appreciates that that free labor.  I wonder if I could surprise him with storage fees?  I had to move it again recently.

Gallery

Here are some pics with descriptions

Cleaning out the slag

Now this was a tough long weekend.FamilyCleanup

Basically, the basement of our earth sheltered home was filled with approximately 11 cubic yards of concrete slag that needed to be broken up and removed so we could prep for pouring the basement floor.

It was something we have known we needed to do since last year, but were putting it off for obvious reasons.

 

 

Here is the video:

Why did this mess happen?

All this concrete was wasted shotcrete that wasn’t on the walls and should not have been on the floor either.

As you may recall, I had used steel studs to frame the basement and then placed metal lath on the inside to “catch” the shotcrete.  I had been told (by the shotcrete guys) that the lath would be enough to prevent much of the shotcrete (peastone) from blowing thru.  I was told to expect a thin layer of concrete on the inside, thin enough that it would break up into small fragments just by walking on it and that it would actually save me from needing to add as much pea stone later.

Watching the shotcrete being applied, it did appear that not much passed thru when it was applied at a downward angle onto the previous shotcrete.  They did do it this way for the first couple levels, and actually raised a scaffold jack platform twice as they went.  But then they got a bit tired and started shooting horizontally and even at an upward angle.  This allowed much more shotcrete to pass thru.

The effect was cumulative with blow thru coming from so many different angles, each adding its own layer of concrete.  The round central room was especially bad for this with at least 3 layers of 2 inch thick concrete across the floor.

And once the crew was working on the inner walls, there was also “rebound”, shotcrete that doesn’t stick to the wall, and “trimmings”, concrete that is cut off the wall because too much was applied in the first place.

All this concrete (that I paid for) ended up on the floor, but not in a good, “wow, you got bonus concrete floor along with your shotcrete” kind of way.  On average, I would say we had about 3 or 4 inches across most of the floor (in several layers), and up to 8 or more inches near the walls, especially in the corners.  It was uneven and lumpy and even had boot prints in it.  The whole feeling was somewhat “war torn” and more than a little depressing.

When I setup the main level, I plan to back the metal lath with fiberglass screen.  The metal lath will still provide the strength to catch the shotcrete, but the fiberglass screen will prevent any material from passing through.

 

 

MetalLathFiberglassScreen

Gallery

Thought I would try to put some extra pics in here…

And the Story.

I like to include the text of the video, along with some extra info that doesn’t fit in a narration, so that the content is google searchable.

For this job, I had hired some teens, rented a jack hammer and taken the day off work to make the long weekend even longer.

The big question was, “How would I get this slag out of the basement?”  The final solution that I came up with was a Bagster dumpster that I got from Home Depot for 30$.

bagster

The plan was to load it up and use my trusty skid steer in to lift it up and out of the basement.

It took a bit of trial and error to figure out the best way to lift the bag and to empty it, but fortunately, we had lots of tries to get it right.  You can see how we did it in the video.

The bagster is supposed to be for only a single use, but it  held up very well, load after heavy load, for a number of days. The only tear was caused by dragging it up the rough wall in the first lift.

TeensThis first day, we were mostly focused on the edges where the thickest concrete was because I didn’t want to rent that 75 lb jack hammer for a second day.  The heavy jackhammer was actually very effective on the thick concrete, but kept getting stuck in the thinner stuff.  For that, the 11 lb breaker was much more effective.  My Dewalt hammer drill also got a work out.  At the start of the day, I couldn’t get the teens to touch the power tools, but by the end of the day, they were much more comfortable with me and the tools and were taking turns on the jack hammer.

On Saturday, my parents were in town, even though I warned them that we would be taking on the worst job of the build so far.  I also hired Zack again, he was one of the teens from the day before.

My father got to cutting a slot in the footings (doorway) for the radon tube while the rest of us got cracking on the concrete slag.  Our radon tube was made of a 4 inch corrugated drain pipe, wrapped in landscapers fabric to keep dirt out.  It just gives radon an easy way to escape so it won’t build up under the basement floor.

Then my father and I worked on the floor drains while the others just kept right on cracking up that concrete.  In order to get the slope correct from the floor drain in the central room all the way to the outer wall, we had to cut open the tops of the footings.

DrainPipe_Middle

 

We had planned for holes in the footings to run these pipes, and I had even come prepared with 4″ PVC to use to form them.  However, the guys doing our footings told me they brought their own 4″ corrugated drain pipe, which they nailed in place very quickly.  The problem was that the flexible pipe “floated” up in the middle when the footings were poured. Instead of being a straight sloped hole thru the concrete, they bowed to the point that we couldn’t even get the 2″ pipes thru.  I guess they were not used to the footings being so wide.  Narrower footings probably wouldn’t have as much deformation due to “floating”.  You may recall this same issue cost me time and money during several other stages of the build. Hopefully this was the last of it.

 

Then we came back out again on the holiday Monday, just my wife and kids.  Sherri and I cracked things up with the 11 lb “breaker” and the boys scrambled to collect the pieces into the buckets.  When the buckets filled up, one of us would dump the bucket in the bagster.  The boys were motivated by being paid 1$ per 5 gallon bucket.  They worked for several hours before wearing out.

With the big chunks finally removed, we raked the smaller bits and then brought in some pea stone, which is required by code in my area.

I came back on another afternoon with Zack and my friend Aaron to get the second half of the pea stone down and rake it all level.  At one point in the video, you can see Aaron intentionally took a pea stone shower, just to see what it would feel like.  I don’t think he will do that again.

BuildingPermit_blurThe final product was a a peastone under-floor that meets building code.  The black pipes are to channel radon out of the home and the white pipes are plumbing or drains.  The inspector approved the work and we were able to rake the pea stone level and move on to the next step.

Next step is to get the vapor barrier, insulation and radiant floor tubes down here so we can pour the basement floor.

 

Drilling a Well

The Video:

I thought this video was more interesting than some of the recent ones.  Hopefully you enjoy it also.

The Story:

I got there a bit early and got to sweeping off my newly poured concrete, but I was really doing some last minute thinking about where the well should go.  Factors to consider range from ease of hookup now, to constructing around it and eventually living with it.

The well drilling crew from Cribley Well Drilling arrived and we settled on a location they could access.  They actually wanted to put it about 10 or 15 feet out from the house, but it would have made it difficult later as I tried to get equipment and trucks around my house…  I had originally wanted it further around the side of the house (which is why the camera angle had been set up that way), but they didn’t think they could drive the truck over there because of the soft sand, and if they did, the well would have been too far from the building and in the way later.  Eventually, they agreed to get it as close as they could to the front of the house.  The main constraint was needing room for the large drill fluid recycling tank behind the well head.  The final location will end up behind a retaining wall, out of the way.

I dug to level the ground for this tank and they filled it with water from the second truck.

tri-cone-00The drill bit was a 9 inch tricone bit.  As an engineer, I have worked on computer simulations for these for my companies “oil and gas” clients, so I know that these are designed for crushing rock and stone.  As the bit turns, the three roller “cones” rotate to break-up and scrape away rock.  Water is pumped in thru the shaft, both to cool the bit and to push the debris out the hole.  You can find an animation here…  It was definitely overkill for drilling in my soft sand, but it got the job done.

They started things off without water, just to locate the hole…  But then they pulled the bit up again and added a spout collar to direct the drill fluid (water with a bit of bentonite clay mixed in) into the recycle tank.  Sand and gravel settles out in the first section of the tank and the cleaner water/clay mixture flows over to the other end of the tank where a hose sucks it back into the truck and thru the drill shaft and down into the well again.  If they didn’t recycle the water, it would take a large swimming pool worth and would make a huge mess.  Every now and then they would need to dig (or dump) the sediment out of the tank.

Versa-drill Rig

After they drill the first piece (with the bit on the end) in to the ground, it is time to add an extension to the shaft.  The $600,000 Versa-Drill rig is designed and built for streamlining this task.

It comes equipped with two hydraulically activated wrenches.  First, the one at the bottom comes out of the back of the truck to hold the lower portion of the shaft still.  The operator runs the drill backwards for a moment to loosen the end piece and then pulls back the “wrench”.

Then they raise the drill up to the top of the mast.  The rig also has a carousel with 15 extensions (capable of drilling 300 ft with what they brought, but they can bring additional shafts if necessary). The carousel rotates the next 20ft shaft section into position and the rig screws its self in loosely.  The second hydraulically operated “wrench” moves into place to hold the new shaft section still while the drill tightens into it.  Then the new shaft is moved into place above the previous piece.

The lower end is threaded in with the shaft below it held in place by the lower hydraulic wrench… and the rig can drill the next 20 ft down.  This process was repeated 20ft at a time, over and over. See the video.

On my site, it was nothing but sand for the first 116 ft.   Then they hit gravel and it made a lot of noise…  Enough to bring me out of my mobile office to see what was going on.  That layer only lasted about 4 ft and they were back to sand.  My neighbor, who lives higher on the hill, came to check it out and told us that he hit water after only 117 ft.  Actually, the same guy who drilled my well had also done the neighbors, but with an older version of the drill rig.  He said that the water table is definitely not flat.

My well didn’t reach “water bearing fines” until about 185 ft…  At nearly 16$ per ft, just for drilling, that difference adds up. The guys from Cribley joked that they wanted to drill further to help pay off their new six hundred thousand dollar rig (yes, he mentioned that price several times and that Obama was letting him write it all off in one year)…  But they stopped at 186ft.

Cleaning out the well

The Versa-Drill V-100NG drilling rig comes equipped with 500/200 air, 3×4 centrifugal mud pump, 15 rod carousel (3½” x 20″, 9GPM water injection, built in 2″ Bowie grouter, 12K winches with job booms, hose reel, and mounted on a 2014 Peterbilt 340 6×6.

 

With the water table reached, they began the process of pulling out the drill, piece by piece, back on to the carousel.  It was pretty much the inverse of the previous process, but went much more quickly.

The next step was inserting PVC casing into the well to keep it from collapsing.  The first piece, the well intake, was special with perforations to let the water in…  The rest were just 6” PVC tubes.  They glued one into the next and lowered it down, repeat.

Well Casing

Since the 6 inch tubes were dropped into a 9 inch hole, there was still some space around the outside.  Leaving this open would let sand fall down the gap and clog the well tip.  To prevent this, they inserted a flexible 1” white tube into that space.  Like before, they put down 20′ at a time and just pushed (without glue) one section into the next.  They pushed it down to just above the water bearing layer.  Actually, they did it so fast, the time-lapse camera didn’t really catch it.  Once it was ready to go, they started mixing bentonite clay into a slurry and pumping it down into the well (at 35$ per bag, you can count them in the video, I didn’t want to).  As they did so, they pulled up the white tube.  This effectively filled the gap around the pipe with clay that would hold the pipe in place without letting water flow around it or sand get down into the water bearing fines…

Mixing Bentonite slurry

Done drilling, it was time to clean up the equipment and pack up…

Overall, they ended up digging nearly 40% deeper than the 135ft that I had estimated.  That increased my cost a couple thousand dollars over the initial estimate (but they have not set the bill yet and it has been over a month). On the plus side, they estimated my well was producing about 50 gallons per minute, which is quite a bit more than the 18 g/m pump that I planned to install.  That means I will have more water than I need, which is a good thing.  Pumping well water is also much cheaper than city water.  At current electric rates, I will pay about 25¢ per 1000 gallons.  My current rate for city water/sewer is about ~8$/thousand gallons.  If we used the 400 gallons per day that the standard American family uses, the well drilling should pay itself off in a little over 5 years.  That swells to 16 years if I include paying off the septic field (which also went about 30% over budget).

 

They will send a different crew to dig a trench and run water pipes to my mechanical room.  A third crew will eventually install the pump and pressure tank after my mechanical room floor is poured. That will need to wait for spring.

The Mistakes:

I don’t know if I made any here yet.  It probably helped that I had experts do the actual work.  But if I find out about any later, I will come back and add it here.  ;^)

The only think I can think of was that after the job was over, there was a lot of bentonite laying on the ground in the area…  It holds the water well and stayed annoyingly squishy for days after the rain passed.  I knew it would be a drainage barrier, so I didn’t want to bury it in place…  Instead I decided to spread it out (with the skid-steer), thinking that might even improve the properties of my surrounding sand…  However, a little of that stuff goes a long way and even spread out, it just made the sand squishy and more difficult to deal with.  I should have just scooped it all up and saved it for later.