A slow 2 weeks...Garage slab was poured

Well, these last two weeks were rather boring. They finished backfilling and then they compacted the garage area and the area for the front porch and back patio with a special compactable soil.

They then put some gravel and rebar in the garage area preparing it for the slab to be poured. Then, it sat for about a week.

Garage compacted

Front porch compacted

Back patio compacted

Garage with gravel and rebar

We'd drive by every day and see nothing, which was disappointing and a little frustrating. Then, one morning after dropping my son off for school I swung by the property and saw the trucks and guys working. I stood and watched them work for a while. I'm sure they thought I was crazy. It was about 40 degrees, SUPER windy, which makes the cold a million times worse and I was in a t-shirt and basketball shorts. I always appreciate watching people do a good job at whatever they are trained to do. These guys worked fast and as a team. I chatted with them for a bit and then had to get home and get back to what I needed to get done.

I was happy to see one truck.

When the other one showed up and they were pouring at the same time I was pretty impressed with the teamwork from these guys.

They had a really cool way of getting the grade. They had big nails with "L" shaped brackets secured to them at a certain height and the bracket fit right into a long aluminum thing in the shape of a 2x4 that was about 10 feet long.

Before even half of the concrete had been poured they were working on smoothing it out.

Started turning white as it dried out.

A day later they came back and cut some lines in the concrete.

This was 5 days ago. No news on the next steps. Lumber should be next and framing but we have started looking at fixtures for plumbing so they can start to frame it out correctly.

Hopefully they'll start the framing soon. We were told the framers that our general contractor uses are the best in the area but that they were a few weeks out. This was back at the time we met to order our windows and exterior doors so maybe in the next week or two. I'm hoping! When not much goes it feels like things are dragging out from day to day, which made the last 2 weeks, a slow 2 weeks!

Slow and steady

Small but steady changes. The crane came back this week and put up a few trusses over the garage but overall, not a lot of externally visible changes, but some small things were done. The timbers for the porch are all mostly in place but I'm told that getting a 4:12 roof to line up with an 8:12 roof is pretty tough and that is what is happening over the porch. This is what they should be working on this week. Entry. Straight ahead will be the fireplace between those two windows. Upstairs, this is one of the last areas that needs to be framed out. The crane will be coming back in this Thursday for the last of the trusses to be hung over the other half of the garage. Though not a lot of visible work was done on the outside of the house this week somethings have been going on inside. If you look at the picture above there is a 2x4 along the ground in the doorway. This is how they framed the whole house. It seems that this week they've been cutting and removing the 2x4 on the th...

Foundations

One of the things I really want is a big, open garage. We planned it all out in the drawings but recently we heard back from the structural engineer that they will have to put a post/column in the middle of the garage. We talked with our builder about what could be done. She asked about a bigger truss but the truss guy says that they can't build a bigger truss. We decided to pay the engineer to do the math and see if a large steel beam could be used because according to our builder she doesn't expect the beam to add that much cost, if its possible. The engineer is currently working on seeing if its possible. If it is possible they will likely have to make the footings bigger and that would add concrete cost but overall the cost can't be predicted until the engineer updates his plans. Once the plans are updated our builder can let us know about costs and at that point we can decide if the increase cost is worth it or not. I feel that paying an engineer a little mo...

Forms and Footings

Things are moving right along. This week they poured the footings. They got the forms up and poured footings within a day or two. One day later they took the forms off the footings and started setting up the forms for the foundation walls. Here the common foundation is not slab like I'm used to from homes I worked on back home when I was in college or high school. We will have a crawl space but it will be about 4 feet tall so its more of a crouch space than a crawl space. This picture below is my daughter who is 4' 6" tall walking around with me on a site visit after soccer practice. In other news, the price of lumber keeps climbing and we have a new estimate on cost, which stinks, because it's a bit higher than the first estimate. Because we had the delay with the financing issues in November/December and we pushed the start date out to late February/early March the costs went up about 35%. This totally sucks but we really have no choice at this point. Below is a sc...

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