Steel Ordered
Well, I managed to get the steel studs ordered this week. I had to pay the 20% higher price then the previous quote from the other distributor (who ended up unable to get me the MarinoWare studs because they only ship when he has enough orders to fill a truck). Anyway, this first order of studs for the basement isn’t very large and the difference was really only a few hundred dollars, so I pulled the trigger and ordered. They said it may be delivered as soon as tomorrow.
Joe is walking down the street and passes a new butcher shop with a sign in the window that says “Sirloin Steak; 5¢ per pound”. He goes in to buy some stake, but they are all out. So he heads over to his regular butcher. “Hey Mac, your competitor down the street is selling steaks for 5¢ per pound. Can you match it?” The butcher smiles, “That’s a great price Joe. Did they have any left?” Joe says, “No, they were all out.” “Well”, says Mac, “When I am out of steak, I can sell it for 4¢ per pound.”
In the meantime, I ordered the track and metal lath separately (from the cheaper distributor) and will pick that up, with my new trailer, Friday morning.
I am buying my Quonset hut from SteelMaster Buildings. I heard that June 16th was the last day to get the 2013 steel prices, so I called and managed to get a great deal. I had budgeted for the list price of about $10,000, but I managed to get it on “sale” for $7200, including all the nuts and bolts and delivery and the kit to connect it to the ICF end walls. That is not bad for more than 4000 lbs of galvanized 22 gauge steel. They will hold it in their warehouse and deliver it when I need it.
This is a construction photo for the same size and type as what I ordered (S-30-15×40). We will need to have a steel raising party ;^) I will end up building the end walls out of ICF forms.
Footings are done.
It has been nearly a week since we poured the footings. The forms have been stripped. But the site was a bit of a mess (chunks of concrete, cigarette packets, nails, etc.) I wanted to return things to the nice soft sand situation I started with, so I took an hour and cleaned things up. I dumped all the concrete chunks in one section of the footing where no one was likely to walk. The wood scraps made a very small pile of kindling and I had a bucket of trash dropped by the crew.
I got out my cell phone and made a quick video to show you where we are.
The exposed aggregate finish looks kind of nice, and will give the shotcrete something to grip, but it may be a bit of a bumpy hassle for laying the track.
The bleeder pipes were made of flexible corrugated drain pipe nailed to either side of the forms. As the heavy concrete was poured, the light weight pipe floated up in the middle, which is probably not ideal at all. The guys pouring the concrete made brief attempts to hold it down by stepping on it. Next time, I will bring my own 2ft sections of rigid PVC so I can get the slope I want.
The concrete bulged in a few places and some of the edges were a little rough, but overall, it worked out nicely…
Funny thing is, I am still waiting on a bill. I have not paid a cent yet. I actually texted Doug today asking if they would send a bill so I can pay it. I am more eager than usual to pay because anything I can pay out before we close (next Tuesday) means I don’t have to bring an extra 10% (safety factor) to closing.
Some of you may have noticed a section of the swallows nest collapsing in the rain during the last video, click here to jump to just before the sand collapses. Did anything bad happen to the swallows? Well, I didn’t find any dead birds, but I found an egg… Oh well.
The building inspector said these swallows were great for eating the bugs flying around the site. I just hope the excavated sand holds up until the little birds are ready to fly.
Steel Shipping Container
Since my construction site is so far from my home, I needed a way to lock up construction equipment (generator, welder, table saw), supplies, etc. I ended up deciding that a 20’ steel shipping container would be a pretty good idea (thanks to John H. for the tip). They are pretty cheap ($1300 to $1600), so I was tempted to buy one (and later bury it), but I got such a great price on rental (79$/month, which is less than half of what others were charging) and delivery from MACs Storage Containers in Lansing that I couldn’t justify buying one…
I had leveled the “perfect spot” across the driveway from the rest of the construction site. But the sand on either side of my driveway is very soft and the heavily loaded tilt truck was just tearing it up. It was quickly stuck up to its axels. Eric, the delivery guy from MACs, started “unloading” where he was, on an uneven spot of sand half overlapping the driveway and pretty much in the way of all the future trucks that would be coming thru. I thought, “Oh well, now I really need to buy a tractor so I can drag this into a proper location.” But it turned out that Eric was just using the tilt bed like a clams foot to push the truck out of its hole and try again. He tried a couple other approaches as I looked hopefully on. Eventually, he asked if I minded him driving on the grass behind the spot, I didn’t. But to make that work, he would need to turn the container around so the door would be on the right side. He slipped it off, drove the truck around and scooped it up again with evident expertise, which I always appreciate in anyone I work with. After that, the delivery was easy and he was out of there quickly.
I will probably need to go and jack up the the front left corner a bit to level it out before I move in. I will also need to buy a couple locks. The container has 4 vertical locking bars so it is pretty secure (unless the theif has a tilt bed truck like Eric). It smelled a bit musty inside, but it has the secure storage space I need. John also gave me the idea of putting a tarp off the one side for a shady place to work.
Here is a video of the delivery, just because I could.
Next steps
Friday (June 20th), I plan to put the basement door bucks together and head out there to lay the basement track. My vertical studs may arrive and so I can start to go vertical on Saturday. I still need to buy some scaffolding, but I will take my 15 ft ladder for now and start with the shorter pieces.
According to my original gantt chart, I should have had the whole footing done 6 weeks ago, not just the basement. We got a late start and both the excavation and footings were stretched out over too many days. I really need to try and catch up before winter sets in.
The latest little thing to go wrong was my steel stud distributor breaking up with the manufacturer of the Marinoware studs that I wanted to use. The distributor tried substituting for another brand that does not include the triangular cutouts that I need. These are critical because they allow the shotcrete to go thru the studs and tie everything together.
I couldn’t accept the substitution, so my order was canceled and I needed to start again with another distributor (from the next county over). However, the new distributor quoted me a price ~20% more than the original distributor for the same products. I know the price of Steel has gone up about 18% over the past year, but ~20% over 1 week is a bit more than I could accept. Thursday and Friday I was making calls trying to get the price back down again. Every time they called me back, I was on the phone in another meeting (at my real job). I will need to pick that back up on Monday (which actually looks fully booked already).
In the mean time, I ordered a 20′ steel container for the site. I will use it for secure storage and as a workshop. I had been very tempted to buy one (for $1300 plus delivery), but at only $76 per month to rent, I couldn’t justify the purchase.
I also ordered the steel track (from the first distributor) so I can start laying out the walls on the footings. The track doesn’t need to be MarinoWare, and actually ClarkDietrich has flexitrack for less than half the price of the MarinoWare track. I just really wanted to get started, and I needed to put in the track before the studs anyway. But even those were a special order that will take a few days to come in…
So, this all left me with nothing to do on the site this weekend.
I decided to focus on finding some of the things I will need later. Buying a pickup truck is pretty expensive, and my car just won’t die, so I long-ago decided it would be financially prudent to buy a small trailer instead. I already have a hitch on my car from my bike rack, but my car can only handle pulling about 2500 lbs. It also turned out that getting temporary electrical service was more expensive and much more hassle (it requires its own inspection) than just buying a generator. I started looking on Craigslist List Friday night and found a few good prospects for trailers and generators.
Saturday morning, each of my kids had a Soccer game. I decided to go to the games and call Craigslist list from there (to setup meetings). I drove separately so I could come and go if I needed to. Before the game even started, my wife mentioned my plan to one of her friends within earshot of my son’s coach. He happened to have a generator that he had been trying to sell. He came over and told me his price, which was quite a bit higher than I was seeing on Craigs list (which is probably why it hadn’t sold). I just handed him my smartphone (with a Craiglist app) so he could browse and get a better idea of the prices I had been seeing. He quickly saw that he would need to drop by over $100 to get into the right $/Watts ballpark. We agreed on $285 for his nearly new 5500 watt Porter-Cable generator. I would have paid closer to $700if I wanted a brand new equivalent. It will power my hammer drill and table saw with ease and even be able to handle a MIG welder (using its 240V socket). When construction is done, it will be a decent backup power source for the house.
We also got talking about trailers and he told me about his folding trailer. I liked the way it could be stored more easily than the trailers I was seeing on Craigslist List. He told me where he bought it (Harbor Freight Tools) and even gave me a coupon.
With the trailer/generator plan sorted out, I could relax and watch the games.
On the way home, picked up the generator and two boxes that contained the parts for a 4×8 folding trailer. Due to a combination of a special deal and the coupon, I got it for only $260 with tax. This was pretty good compared to the $650 trailers I was looking at on Craigslist, the only catch was I needed to assemble it and buy some wood for the deck and side rails.
Fortunately, my brother-in-law, John, had come to the soccer game and was willing to spend his afternoon helping me out. It wasn’t “hard” to assemble, but it had a lot of pieces and having a second set of hands (with their own socket set) helped a lot.
This next week will have a lot of rain and I have a lot of “work work” to do. I plan to get back to working on the house on Thursday or Friday. With any luck, I will be putting up studs by next weekend.
Today was day 3 of the footings… Our first day pouring concrete on the site. The actual work was really all done in about 2 hours, half an hour if you just count the concrete pour time, so it is hard to call it a day. The inspector, Dale, needs to check the footings before the pour and his MWF 10 to noon schedule meant we couldn’t fit this into Monday afternoon like the footings guys wanted.
Here is today’s timelapse video;
Thunderstorms were predicted for 1:00, so I called the building inspector to see if he could put me early on his rounds. He agreed and put me first. I texted Doug Dysert by 8:30 and hoped that would be enough lead time to move the pour earlier…
The inspector arrived just after 10 AM. Keep in mind, this was my first inspection, so I was a little bit nervous. The first thing he did was check out my posted permits. Then he went down into the excavation and gave the forms a good look. The inspector was actually very friendly and said the design was a “work of art” and the execution was “very well done”. He found a couple spots where the rebar was a bit too close to the boards (there is supposed to be at least 2” between the rebar and the forms) and told me to sort that out before the pour. We chatted a bit and then he handed me my “Inspection Notice”, with “approved” written on it. He left by 10:15.
I texted Doug to say we were all ready for concrete, but it turned out that the concrete was scheduled to come at noon anyway. Two of Doug’s guys (Don and Chris from the previous day) arrived at about 11:45. The concrete mixers (two of them) and the pump truck all arrived around noon. It was pretty awesome to see the pump truck extend its huge feet and then unfold its 135 ft arm. I wish the timelapse camera had been angled to catch it.
The concrete pump truck was pretty huge. Its 400 horsepower Cummins diesel motor powers 4 powerful pumps that push the concrete at 4800 psi. The operator told me that he could pump up to 210 yards per hour, but he had it set on the slowest possible setting for my small job. I got my order slip from the driver to confirm that it was 2500 PSI concrete with a slump of 5 inches. It had the ¾ inch natural stone aggregate (6A) along with sand and fly ash.
Fly ash is what Charles Dickens would have seen coming out of the smoke stacks of dirty coal factories before they started capturing it. Trapping that pollutant it in concrete is a good thing. It is also pretty much free (waste product) and replaces some of the Portland cement, which has high embodied energy (and cost). Its tiny particle size increases workability (think tiny ball bearings) of the concrete, so the water content can be reduced, which increases strength and durability… It is really a win-win additive.
Then the clouds parted and the sun came out. The concrete got pumping and things went pretty fast after that. They pumped out most of the 23 cubic yards of concrete in about half an hour. I don’t think the crew had enough people to keep up like they would have preferred. I jumped in to help with the screeding. Even the pump truck operator helped moved the concrete pipe around when he got tired of waiting. The concrete was pretty thick with ¾ inch stones. None of the footings blew out, but it did bulge in a couple spots, which used up more concrete than we were expecting…
For footings, they just screed, they don’t trowel or float. Since the tops of the forms were already level, screeding was just a simple process of “sawing” a board back and forth over the top of the form to level it out.
We ended up needing to use the concrete that was in the bottom half of the long pipe to fill in the last bit of the forms. The pump driver basically dumped it on the sand at the top end of the driveway and we had to bucket it over and down to the footing. Don was using a 5 gallon bucket and I was using a 2 gallon bucket (only other bucket available), but I joked that at least I was filling mine up all the way.
With the last bit of concrete, I built myself a 5 gallon bucket rocket stove. I made the inner form out of cardboard (the night before) and wrapped rope and saran wrap around it to “spiral” the flow. My hope is that it will make a little flame tornado that will push even more heat into the concrete and increase the draft further. I’ll make a separate post on that if it works. This concrete wasn’t exactly designed for high heat so it may not last long.
Then the rain came down again. It was actually a line of storms, hundreds of miles long, all lined up to pass over my site, and nowhere else. They guys thought it would blow over soon and decided to wait it out in the truck. I got in with them and asked how long we would be able to push the vertical rebar dowels into the concrete. They told me not to worry about it, we had “hours”…
Well, nearly an hour later, and the township tax assessor called and asked me to drop off a copy of the plans. The assessor had been out to view the site while we were not there and was totally confused by my footing. She was only about 2 miles away, and I wasn’t doing anything right then, so I took the plans over to her. I hope she devalues the home as much as my bank’s appraiser does. Unfortunately, she seems to like it.
When I got back, Doug was on the phone. Understandably, He didn’t want his guys to sit there waiting any more. He said they could just drill the rebar in later (for ~60$/hr). As I hung up with him, the rain stopped. We went down to check out the concrete and found it was already too stiff to hammer the rebar into anyway. It wasn’t my plan, but now I will have more time to carefully mark the position of the dowels, so it may be for the best.
Not sure if it was just the dollars talking, but Doug really didn’t like idea of the PVC tubes as rebar receptacles. He pointed out that they would be a weak point in the connection between the footings and the rebar. They do not have the strength or the grip. I was more interested in the convenience because I don’t think I need strength or grip in that location. Perhaps we were thinking about different locations. I agree drilled rebar will be critical for the pillars under the concrete ribs. Not sure if we will use the PVC when we get to the main footings, but I have 250 of these things cut and ready to go.
The rain washed off the concrete “crème” and left an exposed aggregate look. I kind of like it and I think the shotcrete will stick to it well. Another “day” done.
I still haven’t seen the bill (or paid anything). In order to get a reasonable bid on this unusually complicated project, I had to get the bid based on “volume and materials”. I thought that was safer than “time and materials” because at least the volumes were calculated beforehand. Basically, I agreed on the cost per cubic yard for forming and pouring as well as the cost, per ton of rebar, for placing and tying the rebar. But I do not yet know what he will charge for the materials (such as the wood, rebar, and concrete) or the total cost of the pump truck, or how the over-orders of material will affect the bill. I am a tiny bit nervous about that.
Well, I managed to get the steel studs ordered this week. I had to pay the 20% higher price then the previous quote from the other distributor (who ended up unable to get me the MarinoWare studs because they only ship when he has enough orders to fill a truck). Anyway, this first order of studs for the basement isn’t very large and the difference was really only a few hundred dollars, so I pulled the trigger and ordered. They said it may be delivered as soon as tomorrow.
Some of you may have noticed a section of the swallows nest collapsing in the rain during the last video, click here to jump to just before the sand collapses. Did anything bad happen to the swallows? Well, I didn’t find any dead birds, but I found an egg… Oh well.
