We had not left quite enough room for a standard garage install and had to get creative with our rear garage door. Here is the video…
The Video
Bells and Whistles
The door was from Lowes and came with the S3 winder so I wasn’t too worried about the torsion spring. I got a side mount garage door opener, specifically a Liftmaster 8500, and was really happy with it.
One interesting side thing: The Liftmaster 8500 had a bunch of extra special features, such as a wireless light, programmable control, etc. but the most interesting thing (to me anyway) was the way the sensors worked. Every other garage door I have owned had a sensor so that if you walked past as it was going down, it would stop and open up. This is the sensor that you always “hop over” if you want to sneak out of the garage as the door is going down. How do you improve on such a basic sensor function? When I first installed it, it didn’t seem to be working, but then I realized that the improvement is simply to wait and see if the obstacle is there for more than a moment. If you just walk past, it doesn’t trip it, no special hop-while-ducking required. You need to interrupt the beam for at least half a second to stop the door from coming down. Pretty minor, but it makes a nice difference 😉
There were a number of issues that delayed starting on the Quonset hut, including two extra weeks for delivery and I had to travel to Europe for a two week business trip… but eventually all the plans were in place and we had a nice weekend forecast (for late October), so my parents and sister (Bonnie) came down from Canada to help out.
The Video:
You can find the full video here:
This all happened about a month ago… But it takes a while for me to find the time to put these videos and blogs together… At the time, I made a short and quick video and posted it to Facebook. Generally, the facebook posts are much closer to real time and are much much shorter than the bog posts. If you are interested, you can like us on Facebook (click over here in the right hand side è)
This is the short video that I posted on Facebook a month ago…
The Numbers:
Each arch is made up of 7 pieces of steel bolted together with half inch bolts. Each arch section ends up weighing ~240 lbs. This portion of the building is my garage/workshop and will eventually have 20 arches and be 30 ft wide and ~40 ft long. For now, I have only put up 11 arch sections because I plan to build some forms for casting concrete ribs in the back and then roll them to the front where a crane can lift them up and move them into place.
The garage steel came on 1 pallet weighing about 4800 lbs. It included 2 buckets and 2 boxes containing about ~5000 pairs of nuts and bolts. The cost for the steel/nuts&bolts/engineering/delivery was $7200.
To assemble the arches, I used the help of friends and family… No one who helped had ever done anything like it before. The first Saturday, I had my parents and sister to help for nearly 12 hours, pre-dawn to dark. We got up 6 arches, which means it took an average of about 8 man hours per arch. Actually, the second arch took 3 hours and 40 minutes, which is about 14.66 man hours… And the 6th arch took 1.5 hours or 6 man hours. That is a decent learning curve. The second Saturday is harder to calculate because I had different people who came at different times for different numbers of hours. The first arch was done by 3 people and some time was lost giving tours to arriving friends, etc. but we were starting on the second arch by 2 hours and 10 minutes later, which is 6.5 man hours. The 9th arch (the last one that we had a full crew for) took 7 guys only 35 minutes, which is just over 4 man hours.
In total, my friends and family gave me 94 man hours over those two Saturdays. If I had to pay a moderate 20$/hour, that would have cost me $1880 in labor. I never got a quote to get the building professionally assembled, so I am not sure how that compares. However much I saved, I really appreciated the help and I hope they had some fun doing it.
The Mistakes:
There was that one piece that we didn’t overlap in the right direction… It should be OK in the end because the seam is almost at the top and we plan to cover the structure in concrete anyway.
I was not able to get the width down to 24 inches each for the arches… I was always half an inch over. I don’t think it will affect the strength much and the extra bit was balanced on both sides, so the building is straight. The biggest problem is that the structure is already about 6” longer than it should be. I don’t yet know how I will handle it when I add the remaining arch segments and get to the end of the slab… I don’t think I want to add an extra footing to move the front wall out 8 inches. The other options include not using the last arch, or perhaps cutting the last arch… I won’t really know how big of a mistake that was until the garage is complete.
Actually, I think this drawing from the manual is a little wrong… The text says over and over again that the 24″ should be bolt hole center to bolt hole center…
The Story:
The assembly actually began on Friday. I knew we had a lot of hours ahead of us, so I asked my friend Aaron to come out and help me get 4 ribs together. It took us about an hour to get the first couple together. We timed the second couple and managed to get down to 17 minutes for each of those.
We arrived before dawn and were prepared to raise the first arch soon after sunrise. The arches went up pretty easy, for a 240lb arch of 20 gage steel. The biggest issue was really how flexible they were…
The first one had nothing to lean it against, so we braced it with wood and rope and then hurried to get the second one up to stiffen the assembly. The second arch was very difficult. I thought it was going to collapse at one point and I was seriously questioning my plan to erect this structure without any professional help.
However, as we bolted the two arches together, things started firming up. This was good because the wind started to pick up. You can see things start to move and shake in the video. I spent a lot of time stressing about the width of the arches, but it was really the wind that made me push on to get a few more arches up to increase the stiffness of the structure. The instructions said to assemble 4 sections and then tweak the building, so we moved ahead.
The 3rd and 4th sections went up pretty easily. We had a pretty good rhythm for bolting things together and it helped that the sun was out and things were warming up nicely. We now had almost a ton of steel up and the wind was not flexing it as much.
After the 4th arch, my father and I were fighting with the steel to try and get the width down to 24 inches… We just could not compress it that far. The depth was correct, and that made no sense to me.
Since I was too distracted to provide any guidance, the ladies took the initiative and started assembling the 5th arch on their own. Unfortunately, they assumed all the steel pieces were the same… which would have been right for a true Quonset, but this was an “S-type” made up of two different radius pieces. It was clearly curving too much and Bonnie realized something was wrong. She interrupted my stressing and said, “Hey are there two different radius pieces here?” Oops, I felt bad for letting them waste their time. I took a moment to explain the two different curvatures and how the pieces went together and then they got back to work.
I eventually accepted the slightly greater than 24 inch width and started drilling holes and bolting down the arches. Perhaps this was a big mistake, but I couldn’t see any other way forward.
The view from the top was nice though…
The 5th arch went up very easily and the ladies (now expert) began to assemble the 6th arch while the men bolted the 5th to the 4th. Sherri and the boys arrived just as we were getting ready to raise the 6th arch. It had been tough for me to manage all three ropes during the pull, so I was glad to have Sherri up there to help. After the 6th, it was clear that the day was ending and we wouldn’t necessarily have time to get another arch fully in place and properly secured before dark… We decided not to try and raise any more ribs that day. Instead, we just prepped for the next Saturday.
My family went home to Canada and I spent the next week trying to get enough local friends together to help me put up a few more arches before winter really set in… Many of my friends had prior commitments or were working, etc. Some could come for earlier hours, some could come later, Some could only come on Sunday instead of Saturday, etc. I was mostly concerned about not having enough guys there at one time to actually pull up the ribs. However, by Thursday, I did get enough to sign up for a fun workday in the freezing cold.
On Saturday morning, Aaron and Don showed up first. Since we didn’t have enough people to pull a full arch into place, we decided to try the “piece by piece” method. It actually worked pretty well, although it was a bit slower than the other method and we did make one overlap mistake (probably because we were rushing).
Then more friends arrived. Carl and his son Kent came with Doug, so we had an instant crew. A while later, my brother-in-law, John, arrived. Getting the arches into position with that many guys was pretty easy and then we had several pairs working on bolting things all together… The biggest bottle neck was waiting for me to anchor the arches to the concrete at the end. My previous approach had been to work bolting the ribs together, and then work on anchoring the previous arch (we kept the current arch loose so the next one could be fit over it easier). However, with so many guys bolting the arches together, it made much more sense for me to start anchoring the previous rib as soon as the new rib was up, but I still couldn’t finish before the guys got the rest of the bolts in place. We got pretty fast by the end of the day.
Next, I will need to grout the trench. The building is attached to the ground, but doesn’t have real strength until the feet are fixed in place so they can’t lean in or out.
These things usually start early in the morning… This morning, we were all ready to get these footings poured without any of the usual last minute running around. Three concrete mixing trucks were waiting at the bottom of the drive way as a dozen guys from Dysert Concrete arrived. The concrete pump truck arrived and while it setup, the guys were walking around and scratching their heads about my strange layout. Some were even taking pictures with their cell phones.
I showed some of the guys where the garage formwork had been done incorrectly and they started figuring out what to do. I was nervous because the first few guys clearly had no idea how to mount the groove form… But then a guy showed up who clearly knew what he was doing and took over organizing that work while some of the other guys got to filling the other forms with concrete.
The concrete mixer trucks dump their concrete into the back of the pump truck. The pump truck comes equipped with powerful pumps that can push the heavy concrete thru its 135 ft boom. The operator has a remote control box and walks around with a few of the of the concrete guys to control the movement of the boom and the flow rate of the concrete while they guide the end of the pipe along the form. It is quite something to hear that concrete falling down thru the pipe. For a big job like this, the pump truck really is worth the money. The alternative would have been trying to position the mix trucks around the site and push or wheelbarrow the concrete to the inner parts of the forms…
Initially, they overfilled the forms. The thin lap siding formwork was not strong enough and started to give way and lean out. I guess there were not enough stakes in the soft sand to hold back that much pressure. And after that, they filled the forms only half way and gave it some time to stiffen up a bit before coming back for a second pass. After the forms are filled up, they simply screed them off. It was amazing how the weight of the concrete pushed out even the 2×12 boards.
Meanwhile, the larger group were still working to properly finish the groove forms for the garage.
By the time the form for the garage was ready, they had already finished pouring the footings for the rest of the house. They started by filling the perimeter of the garage footing. They gave that a little bit of time to stiffen up because this was 18 inches thick and even more likely to blow out. While they waited, they pushed in vertical pieces of rebar along the middle of the floor to mark the floor slope.
Eventually, they started filling up the slab area, but quickly ran out of concrete. Another whole truck arrived and they dumped it out, but it didn’t go too far either. Along the way, they were screeding off the surface with long poles and leveling the concrete against the side of the forms and the rebar pegs in the middle. On the right side of the below picture, you can see the power screed that they used.
I noticed a slight bulge were my radiant floor pex tubes went under the concrete. I pointed it out and they said that it must be floating up. They said I should have tied it down every 8 inches… I thought that they (as experienced professionals) should probably have checked that before starting. Anyway, since we were waiting for the next concrete delivery to come anyway, they just gave the concrete a little time to stiffen and then pushed the pipe under (using long sticks) and pulled concrete (screeded) over it. I was still very nervous that it was still too close to the surface, but they told me it would be fine. I didn’t think until later that I could have put a piece of that 6×6 inch welded Wire reinforcement over the pex pipe to make sure that it stayed down…
Another truck load of concrete arrived and was pumped out. This time my concern was that the 6×6 WWR (Welded Wire Reinforcement) had been stamped down too much, especially at the front of the garage. Like the rebar, this welded wire reinforcement needs to be fully encased within the concrete to do its job. It doesn’t do much if it is trampled down under the concrete. I had been pestering the guys to try to pull up WWR elsewhere, and they made some halfhearted attempts upon each request, but at the front of the garage, where the slab sloped to the full 18 inches thick, it was so trampled down that I concluded it would be hopeless to ask them to pull it up… Instead, I waited until they got the got concrete in, and then I brought over two more big pieces of WWR and laid them on top before they guys had a chance to screed things over… Hopefully, these additional pieces stayed within a few inches of the surface where they could do their jobs.
With only one little corner left to go, they sent the pump truck home and we waited for the last concrete mixer truck. Most of the crew left also, except for two guys who were going to hang around and do the finish work on the slab.
After the last couple yards of concrete were in place, the senior guy used a power trowel to work the surface. The younger guy got busy working on removing the wood that held the groove form in place. Since things were now setting up quickly, my family and I rushed to press our hands into the stiffening concrete.
They took the power trowel over the surface 4 separate times and did a pretty good job there and on visible edges of the slab.
All in all, the footings and garage floor took 78 yards of concrete. The guys put down about 1300 lbs of rebar in the footings and I added another 530 lbs in the slab floor. That is just shy of a full ton, not including the fourteen 16×8 sheets of 6×6” WWR.
They came back the next day to remove the forms and cut grooves in the concrete… However, they didn’t want to cut up in the area where the radiant pex tubing had floated near the surface.
Mistakes:
On the whole, the footings turned out pretty well, and I appreciate that Dysert concrete was even willing to take on this job (many other companies didn’t even call me back after seeing the plans).
However, as a first time General Contractor, I made some mistakes here (just like every other phase of construction).
I should have checked those forms better. As the rule of thumb goes, “put as many stakes as you think you need, and then add a couple more.” We didn’t have enough stakes in many places, especially on the bedroom side where the sand is softest. The bulges are a bit ugly, and they wasted concrete (more volume than needed). In one spot where the form leaned out, it actually affected the surface level of the footing and may give me a bit of a headache later… Oh well, at least these footings will be buried and never seen again. They don’t need to be pretty to do their jobs well.
I did ask one or two guys if the pex tube that I placed looked right, and they just gave me a nod and a grunt… I should have got someone to check my work more closely. Then they would have seen my mistake (not tying them often enough). Things would have been more secure and I could have properly cut the slab to prevent cracks… As it is, I have 3 long (thin) cracks across the uncut portion of my slab…
I should have complained about the level for the grove form. I saw that the east side sagged a bit in the middle, but I thought it would float up or be taken care of some other way… I didn’t say anything and now I need to deal with water pooling in that area. It won’t matter when I am finished the Quonset and grout the groove, but in the meantime, it is annoying. If that water freezes, it could cause damage. It could also rust the bottom of the Quonset steel before it is grouted…
Generally speaking, you need to speak up about concerns and get them addressed before the concrete gets poured… It is too easy to get swept up in the frenzy when there are so many things happening on the site.
