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.
Today was the first day of installing the footings on our Earth Sheltered Umbrella home. You can find the video here.
After the initial excavation, we tried to stake out the basement but the hole wasn’t big enough and we had to call back the excavators to dig a little bit wider (see the last post). When I showed up on Friday (after a nearly a week off the site), I found that it was excavated well enough most of the way around, except on the north east side. On the west side, they had to excavate past the side of where the garage footing would have gone. The plan B had been to setup the footings for the basement and garage at the same time, but the over excavation cut into dirt under the garage, so we will need to save that for after the excavation. Plan C was to just form the basement footings and consider that practice for the rest later.
The crew from Dysert Concrete arrived on site around noon. There was a range of experience from one who had worked with Doug Dysert since they were both children, to the new guy who had started that week. No one on the team had ever done curved forms before, but they were all up to the challenge.
At one point, Doug sent the new guy to get the majibulator from the front of his truck. The new guy scrambled up out of the hole and got half way to the truck before Doug called him back and told him that there was no such thing as a majibulator.
Doug had brought 12 inch lap siding for the curved portions of the form and 2x12s for the straight parts. My computer model had made it pretty easy to estimate how much of each material we needed, but due to the change of plans (not doing the garage), I ended up with some extra materials on site. The lumber yard was out of stakes Doug bought 1x4s and sharpened them on site.
The team decided that Sherri and I had done a good job on the stakes (within a quarter inch and enough extra ones to capture the shape) so they used them directly and started forming within a few minutes.
Doug had brought his copy of my plans and we referenced it regularly. It was a bit of a hassle because the plans incorrectly showed the footings as 1.5 ft wide in the main view (the more detailed views correctly showed 2 ft). This caused at least one mistake where we made one of the piers 6 inches wider than it needed to be. The plans also did not include the extra footing bits that the building inspector wanted, so we had to remember to add those.
Doug had to leave part way through the afternoon for another appointment (so his crew will have work all summer), which left me responsible for the layout. Along the way, I made several mistakes that I realized right after the boards were cut and nailed into place. Some could be easily undone (such as the east pier where I just cut a board too long for where I intended it, but it still fit perfectly in the next spot. Other mistakes were not worth fixing and just added a little volume to the piers. The other guys (Baudillio and Jose) were pretty patient with me and only chucked a little when I would say, “No, wait, thats not right.” When I slowed down I made fewer mistakes. In total, I figure my errors only added about 4 cubic feet to the 18 cubic yards needed for the footing. That is less than 1 percent. (total concrete volume of the basement footings is 18 cubic yards (486 cubic feet) or about 73000 lbs).
I was very careful to place the inside boards so that each would only have 1 side and 1 end against concrete. This will make it much easier to remove them later.
The north east side of the site (top right corner of the scene, mostly off camera) was not excavated far enough and the guys had to dig it out manually… They ended up re-digging it numerous times because they didn’t throw the dirt in the right place (twice) and because the sand wall behind kept caving in and dumping more sand in the area. In the hot sun, it became a “laugh so you don’t cry” sort of thing, but we managed to get that last footing in and everyone left by 5:00 PM.
I noticed that when the guys wanted to keep their water jugs cool, they buried it in the cool earth. They didn’t build a little wooden box around it. Just sayin’
I also noticed that a couple of the guys put oats in the bottom of their water bottles… I wasn’t sure if they were eating those as a snack while they drank or had some other reason. The “new guy” asked about it and the others laughed and asked him if he ever had oat meal. “Same thing”, they said.
The laser level Doug brought was not working, so we just put the forms in for now and will need to come back next week to level them and add the ton (literally) of rebar.
When it was done and the guys were packing up, they said, “At first we thought the curves would be harder, but it all went pretty easy.” They all took pictures. I assume they don’t think most of their jobs are photo worthy.
If I did it again, I would use a saw table to make straighter cuts for the boards. The free hand cuts were pretty sloppy and made it harder to get the 90 degree angles for the piers. I guess it was good enough for footings work, but I don’t think it would have been any harder to make the more precise cuts and may even have made it easier to assemble and level. The hardest part would have been getting the table and power down into the hole.
Monday is rebar day, and hopefully I can get the building inspector out there on Wednesday so we can still pour this week… Now I need to think of what to do with the extra concrete. Any ideas? I am thinking a bucket rocket stove could use up a little.
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.
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.
