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.
Video
You can find the Video here:
Experienced workers and new technology
They 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.
In 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.
Friends
You 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
In 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
I 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.
Rented Scaffolding
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.
Our earth sheltered home relies on thin shell concrete to support the earth loads. I do know of large earth sheltered homes with >50 ft domes made of thin reinforced concrete less than an inch thick, but that sort of precision is difficult. My vaults are relatively small (<15 ft across), but will be 6 to 8 inches thick of very strong (>8000 psi) shotcrete. Once that shotcrete has set, it will be very strong, but before it sets, it is very heavy and needs to be supported.
Rather than build a separate frame to support the structure which will later need to be removed, I am embedding a rebar skeleton within the structure that will support it while it cures and then reinforce it for the next few hundred years until its final job is making it very difficult for someone to tear down.
The #4 rebar is spaced 12 inches apart (horizontal and vertical), tied and then welded (mainly because my family is climbing all over it). We then use metal lath on the inside, tied to the rebar, to catch the externally applied shotcrete.
You can see how the shotcrete was done on the basement level in this old post. Due to the mess of shotcrete passing thru the metal lath in our basement, we have decided to add an additional layer of fine fiberglass screening to the bedroom. The fiberglass still needs to be backed by the stronger metal lath, but it should prevent much more (probably all) of the shotcrete from passing thru.
The video
The schedule
I don’t want to go back and look at my gantt chart (schedule) to remember how long this process of rebar and lath for the bedroom wing was supposed to take. Actually, I don’t even think it is taking much longer than I estimated. The real problem is that I work full time (and even spent 2 weeks traveling to Germany for work) and there were other important things to work on (the electrical service entrance, ribs and quad deck floors all took more of my time then expected, those videos will be compiled sooner or later), so I just didn’t get to put enough time into this frame.
Of course, I wanted to push thru and try to get shotcrete up before winter, but then I got thinking about all the other things I had to do first, such as install the electrical conduit and build forms for the skylight curbs, and I decided I had best take my time and do it right.
Strategically, I also decided that if I focused on the electrical and garage instead, it would give me an enclosed workshop space to work on those skylight curbs and other forms over the winter and I would be in a better position to proceed in the spring. Hopefully, that works out as planned.
The Side Stories
Zack
Zack (the teen I met thru the high-school guidance councilor) has been helping me off-and-on for a few months now. Zack has many siblings, mostly little girls, but a couple times he has mentioned that he has an older brother named “Will” that would like to help. Now that we are tying rebar, there is as much work as they can handle, so I told him he could bring his brother. It turned out that Will couldn’t make it, but Zack said he would bring another brother. He didn’t give the name, so I told my wife, Sherri, that I would guess it. I figured they were going for late letters in the Alphabet because they already had a “Will” and a “Zack”, so I predicted that they would use a “Y” or “X” for the next brother. I couldn’t think of very many names that began with those letters, and figured that Yuri was unlikely (in our Dutch/German area), but since they went with Zack, I bet my wife that his brothers name would be Xavier… I was right.
Rotating Mount
Sorry if that rotating scene made anyone sick. At first, I thought those rotating scenes were pretty cool, but I may have run the speed up a bit too high in the final edit. I can’t promise not to do it again because I ended up using that mount a few more times to film scenes for upcoming videos ;^). The mount was basically just an Ikea cooking timer that I added a 1/4-20 nut to the bottom (to fit my camera tripod) and a spare go-pro mount to the top. It makes one full turn per hour. This is the Youtube video that I followed (roughly) to make it. It cost less than $7.
Shock value?
There is one sequence in the video where Michael (my 9 year old) is climbing all over the outside of the master bedroom vault. Moments later, Sherri is doing the same thing to tighten all the wires (note her clearly “Egyptian” stance). Anyway, I thought this would freak out my mother-in-law pretty well, and I kind’a like doing that from time to time, so I rushed that clip thru a mini production and put it up on the Facebook site (which you can join up on the right side of this page). To my disappointment, it didn’t surprise her at all. She either didn’t think it was very high or dangerous or she is getting quite used to Sherri doing all sorts of crazy things to build this house. Oh well.
Generator
My generator was on the fritz a bit in the middle of all this and there were several weekends where it would only start on the rare occasion. It started often enough that I didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to replace it, but rarely enough that it really killed efforts to get this rebar up and kept shifting me to other jobs that didn’t require electricity. Eventually, we decided that enough was enough and got a new generator. Of course, we got a bigger one. Suddenly my welder has a lot more power and I can weld that rebar much more quickly, so woo hoo. Anyone want to buy a used generator with a mystery starting problem?
The Gallery
Just some pics and timelapse stills from this portion of the build.
You may recall that we had steel arches rolled (curved with big rolling wheels) into arches. However, these arches needed legs welded to them. They also needed a way to fasten them to the footing and a way for them to hold rebar.
The first two of those ideas are looked at in this video. Details and how we attached the rebar are included in this post…
The Video
Welding the arches
The steel fabricators that rolled my arches are also expert welders (among other things). I did get a quote to weld the arches together, but it was $6000, and that was just for the 30 arches on the bedroom side (not the other arches in the radial vaults). That is about 100$ per leg welded on, or, assuming 4 welds per leg, 25$ per weld… And that doesn’t even weld the arches to the feet or attach any rebar. I assumed the quote meant that they wanted me to learn to weld, so I bought a cheapwelder on Craigs list (a couple hundred bucks got me fully setup) and practiced so I could do it myself.
The arches arrived on site in early may. All the half circles had been cut to 180 degrees. Some of the larger ones were actually segmented in 2 or 3 pieces so they could more easily be delivered. The Elliptical arches were not trimmed (I would need to use my template).
My sister came out to help and we spent the morning practicing and getting the settings right on the welder. When it came time to weld the real arches, we first needed to assemble the pieces together and we needed the legs to be parallel. We did this by setting things up with equal diagonals and then building a brace jig, like a truss, to keep things aligned correctly. The jig took a few extra minutes to build, but we had a number of arches of each size, so we were able to re-use it and save a lot of time later.
Early in the welding, we were very serious and wore all the gear and clamped the jig on again after flipping the arch to weld the bottom… By the end, I stopped wearing the jacket, switched back to sandals and didn’t worry about the jig after the initial welds were in. Actually, not wearing all the protection helped train me to be a better welder. There is nothing like hot metal burns to teach you how to weld without sputtering.
I did, however, keep wearing the gloves. I found the best way to weld was to old the gun with both hands and to rest one of them on the work to stead the gun. The other hand could then control the gun with good fine motion control.
I also learned the importance of keeping that shielding gas concentrated around the work and how sensitive the welds were to the settings on the welder. If the wire speed was too fast or two slow, welding became difficult, and experience taught me to quickly realize that I needed to adjust the settings up or down for the conditions.
Along the way, a number of people stopped by to try their hands and welding. Only one of them had any prior experience (and he taught me a thing or two).
My 10 year old also got a few good welds in.
Of course, I ended up doing most of the welding by myself. I could weld and move the small arches; but larger arches were very awkward (and just a little bit heavy), so I relied on my wife, Sherri, to help move them. At one point, Sherri tripped (on a piece of rebar) and lowered the arch as she caught her self, but the welds were still hot, so she got a nice burn on her shoulder. We gave the steel lots of time to cool after that. I started staging things so that instead of welding all the arches of the same size in a series (where I would need to move arches between each set of welds), I would weld a set of “nesting” arches (of various sizes) that I could weld all at once and leave on the ground until Sherri could come out to help me flip them all.
Steel arch bases
As I have said before, my best example for this sort of construction is “Formworks.” Check out their Facebook page for lots of great pictures. These guys have lots of experience and they know how to make the process doable for the do-it-yourself market. They have features like brackets that you bolt to the ground and then the steel arches fit into them and are bolted in place. They also have Z clips pre-welded to the sides of the arches so you can easily place rebar and just hammer the clip to lock it in. The catch is that all this convenience comes at a steep price. I needed to come up with a much more cost effective way to get the job done.
I considered buying scaffold feet (as I had for the tower columns), but they were about 5$ each and would need to be bolted down with 4 bolts in 4 drilled holes. That would mean careful alignment and lots of time drilling.
If I stripped the requirements down, I needed 2 things. 1) a bearing surface to spread the weight of the steel out so it wouldn’t penetrate the footing. 2) a vertical pin to keep the leg of the arch from moving laterally. There was no need to prevent rotation, so i really only needed one hole, and there was no need to prevent lift, so I didn’t actually even need to bolt the feet down.
My final solution was just a 4×4 inch steel plate, 3/16ths of an inch thick, with a hole in it. I would use a piece of scrap rebar as a pin to keep the plate and the steel arch in place. I got quotes on getting these made and was told hundreds of dollars. I forget the exact ridiculous number, but it worked out to nearly $8 dollars per drilled hole. So I decided I would take care of this myself. The savings would pay off my drill press for the second time.
To position and assemble these bases, I drilled a single 4 inch deep hole in the footing and put an 8 inch long piece of scrap rebar thru the hole in the plate and into the hole in the footing. I then welded the rebar to the steel plate with 3 tack welds. I didn’t grout or epoxy or bolt anything. To set the arch, I would simply put the end of the steel tube over the rebar, adjust the location a bit and then weld it to the metal plate.
This solution was cheap to make, and quick and easy to install. The only catch was that I needed to weld each connection… This is a pic of a place where three of these bases were near eachother, so I used a “double” plate and welded it to the adjacent “single”.
Attaching the horizontal rebar
Placing vertical rebar is easy, you just drill a hole in the ground. Attaching horizontal rebar to smooth steel tubes is harder. If you tie it, it may just slide down. Welding everything in place as you go would probably be too time consuming and would require more hands than I usually have.
I decided to try and find a cheaper way to replicate the basic idea of the Formworks Z brackets. I started by looking at prices of various channel steel that would work. As usual, buying actual raw materials is not the cheapest way. I found that I could get steel shelving pieces (made in China) for the best price. I would just cut them into 3/4 inch slices and weld them to the frames myself.
I prepared about 5 of these, but when I added up the cost of materials and my time (at only 10$ an hour) for slicing and grinding down the excessively sharp edges, they came to about $0.50 each. And that didn’t even include the time to weld them to the frames and I would have hundreds of these.
Another idea was to weld S hooks to the sides of the frames so that one side of the hook could catch the rebar. I bought a few of these for about $0.25 each, but couldn’t find a good bulk price. I found that they were easy to weld in place, but the opening was a bit tight and I would need to hammer them open a bit to better receive the rebar.
Then I decided I could just buy a big box of nails ($0.01 each) and weld those on at an angle to catch the rebar. Then I could just hammer those over to hold the rebar firmly in place. But the welding task was still daunting and my wife thought they created a real hazard on the job site. “You’ll poke your eye out kid.”
Then I decided to break it down to its simplest concept. I couldn’t just wire the rebar to the smooth vertical steel tubes because it would just slide down. All I needed to do was stop the sliding. I decided to notch the steel with my grinder. I made the notches every foot (my horizontal rebar spacing) and made sure that the tie wire caught the notch… Problem solved. The cost was very small (one $2 disk could make all the notches for the project) and no welding was required. Actually, my friend Aaron brought me a 10 pack of metal cutoff disks that he had for some reason, so it was all free to me.
Mistakes were made
Perhaps in my misguided effort to be a good host, I made a few mistakes by setting up a few early arches without first carefully laying out the locations of all the arches. This meant that my first few arches were welded in place before I noticed that I had some how made a 5 degree error in placing the first one… I ended up “adjusting” the other base locations to try and sort out the locations, and it will all work out, but without the crisp straight lines that I originally thought I wanted.
German vs Spanish
Online, you can find many examples of “German” earth shelters where the construction is very precisely planed out and executed. Even if they have “free form” shapes, they are constructed very precisely to the specified forms. You can also find many “Spanish” examples (including many in Germany ;^) where the builders basically hand formed the rebar arches as they went, perhaps based on some rough sketches, and ended up with a much more organic free-form design.
I had started this build with a more “German” ideal in mind. I used Marino Ware studs to get perfectly vertical walls. I had the steel arches rolled by professionals to exacting specifications. The design its self was very euclidean geometric so that I could precisely work out all the angles.
But as it is going up, small mistakes (mine and others) and approximations are adding up and it is becoming more and more “Spanish”. My epiphany was when I realized that this was because I was the one making many of the approximations, and that, perhaps, I was a bit “Spanish” in my construction. I also decided that it will still all work out, even if it ends up looking a bit more organic rather than purely geometric.
Next Post
In the next post, we will finish erecting the steel arches and start putting up rebar. I just couldn’t fit it all in to one video/post
They 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.
In 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.
You 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.
In 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.
I 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.
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.
