No Turning Back

When its been set in concrete there is a certain finality, point of no return. You can't sell a piece of land with footings for some random house that most people wouldn't want finished let alone with all this work to do yet.

So Friday morning dawned with a feeling of full force forward as we watched the first concrete truck rumble down the driveway - only to have it stuck in the mud 1 minute later. Oh, the joys of building in the winter.

Fortunately everyone moved quickly and we got gravel under the tires and it was able to haul its own immense weight out of the deep ruts it had made. So on we go.

Along with the concrete trucks themselves we had a concrete pumper, here is the pumper above.

Of course what else do you call yourself when you are a cool concrete pumping dude, his real name is Ed and he rocks. Its amazing to watch this thing in action, Denali was very scared of the big black hose that seemed to have a life of itself as concrete pumped through its entire length.

Working with concrete is a bit stressful on the day as its a combination of wait, wait, wait - MOVE, MOVE MOVE. It took a small army of guys moving through the forms and multiple layers of concrete, so they went around the whole foundation a few times.

A little snippet of it all happening.

The hammering you can hear is their version of vibrating. You need to vibrate concrete in a form to get rid of air bubbles and make sure all the concrete settles evenly. With a big area like this they just hammer the sides of the forms to settle the concrete into place.

Here is the finished product and below are the footings for the mid-wall that will run between the living space and the second bedroom. And you can see Jim from Precision Concrete trowel finishing off the top of the footing walls.

The next morning the forms were removed and beautiful concrete walls were exposed. They really came out well.

After the walls were cleaned and removed of excess debris, Kyle coated the exterior walls and the interior drainage wall with dry-loc as an additional waterproofing before the gravel and drainage pipes are added around the exterior and on the interior wall where there is drainage.

Next step is adding the drainage and concreting the floor of the crawl space. Then the containers!!!