Concrete Pour

Its been an exciting few days to catch up on.  On Friday very early concrete was poured.

We woke up extra early to make it out to our lot to watch the pour and made it out around 7:45 to find that they were about half way through with the pour which went on for about another hour from when we showed up.

A couple of things were resolved on Friday, the root cellar wall was moved to where its supposed to be, although the small channel open to the ground that I had planned wouldn’t actually work.  The forms are physically just too big to do something like that so instead they slipped a few sleeves into the footings and poured the root cellar floor as one continuous beefy footing with three holes for drainage.  The second thing that was settled was the odd letter we received from the city about our non-conforming sewer line…  We were told that we actually were sent that letter because our lack of sewer was non conforming and the work we did works for them.

The one new issue of the day that we discussed was how we get water off of the roofs.  I really don’t like the idea of introducing vertical elements into any of our façades.  At one point there was talk that we could run two gutters inside our walls, but with the panels that might not be the best solution.  Right now I’m leaning towards holding our rain screen on the north side off of the building by about 2″ and running the downspouts inside that space.  We had discussed this before as a possibility for bringing water up for hose bibs and I think it makes the most sense to me, but we’re still thinking about it and have a few weeks to decide for real.

Forms Taken Down

This morning, some time before noon, the concrete guys came back and stripped the forms leaving just bare beautiful concrete basement walls, and the wall for our cantilevered deck support.  I’ve been a little nervous about our deck wall just standing around unbraced, but it seems pretty solid so I suppose its alright for a little while.

Work is going to keep on rolling with the house.  We should be able to free up more money soon and make another draw on our construction loan, which means getting fabrication going with the SIPs and placing an order for windows.  Prior to putting up the SIPs there is a bit of site work to do.  The first couple of things are that a plumber will come in and run the sewer and water in to stubs through the basement floor, then crushed rock will be poured into the space in between basement footings and more concrete guys come in and pour our slab for the floor and steps down to the root cellar.  Then on the outside, foundation drains will go in and then we can back-fill the ditch around our foundation.  Our excavator is a bit hesitant to come in to back-fill until a week has gone by to wait until concrete has cured sufficiently, but our contractor and concrete guy both think he’s being overly cautious.  But anyways, once thats all done, the top half of the basement can be framed up as well as the first floor floor.  Once thats all in place, we’ll be ready for the SIPs which hopefully will have been in production during that time and will show up ready to be popped into place.