Day 21
I trust everyone had an awesome week. We made great progress on our job site this week; despite some wicked weather on Thursday. The foundation contractor said it was just like a scene out of the 10 Commandments when Moses parts the Red Sea! I don’t think I couldn’t write any words that describes the heavy rains & wind we experienced on the job site. Thank goodness the weather has turned and back to “normal” weather.
So what did we get done? Starting Monday, Matt and Dave got busy laying out the perimeter of the job site with marking paint. They really don’t get this exact as the footings will be plotted a little later. The idea here is to get enough dirt from around the forms the contractors can walk around on both sides.
The goal this week was to get the foundation footings ready for concrete pour. So what really are the components of the foundation? The footings are typically constructed in two phases—phase one (the one we are in this week) consists of digging the area where the concrete “foot” will rest. The foot is nothing more than an 8” tall by 16” (our engineered specs, can vary with application) wide rectangular width of concrete extending the length of the area you need supported—in my example our west forms will be 60’. The way the foundation guys build this is typically with 2x8 x 12’ length of framing material, connected end to end and strapped on the top and sides with special clamps and iron stakes. Also, two pieces of #4 rebar is added to the form; once the pour is made additional rebar is added vertically which will connect to the wall (phase 2). During the wall build, the forms contractor needs to layout the interior walls exact aligned to the building plans on top of the footing. They use a laser and chalk line as a guide then they start constructing the wall forms. This is what we will be doing next week. Let’s continue with our phase one deliverables.
Matt hooked up the gigantic 5 foot bucket on the excavator and started in the NW corner-digging across to the south. Imagine walking on the front deck from north to south. Once we completed the west side you could start to see how much earth is displaced. Matt was putting all the dirt inside the perimeter of the home. Sophie points out how this works:
Notice we are starting to find a couple of rocks—they stay outside the job site and dirt begins accumulating on the left.
This process of digging with the huge bucket continues around the South corner and now Matt maneuvers the excavator towards the East. For those wondering distances, the front (West) is 60’ whilst the North-South ends are 38’. Matt soon rounds the corner at the SE corner and now the digging gets hard—reason being he needs to dig deeper and Matt now finds the famous Camano Blue Clay—this stuff is very hard. Did I say this stuff was very, very hard? The 5’ bucket can no longer make decent progress he needs to go back to the smaller bucket with prongs (teeth) to continue the dig. This slows the pace but allows Matt to complete the East side; only the North end now but its quitting time and that will be the place where Matt begins on Tuesday. If you look closely at the photo, we are now digging on higher ground than the area of the west; that is the 12% grade factor and we will be “stepping” the foundation along the grade—the east side will have a full height concrete wall; whilst the west side will be a short foundation wall and topped with framing (less expensive). Did I mention concrete is now a $100 a cubic yard? (Whine!!)
As you can see from the photos, it’s been a relatively wet week—just enough to make walking in the job site with rubber boots a must! Tuesday we completed the perimeter dig and started digging in the interior spaces to their final grade.
As you do this process, it’s literally an unveiling—each bucket of dirt yields just a bit more of the job site. All of us were starting to notice something interesting beginning to show on the SW corner of the dig—the reason was, this was originally intended for crawl space and it’s starting to become clear the space should be developed square footage that should be added to the living area. An on the job decision is made to do that after huddling with Matt and Dave. This will add an additional space of 15x15 (225 square feet) to the basement for little $$.
Matt continues digging inside the walls and now has to put all of the dirt on the outside of the dig. You might ask, why in the h-e-l-l didn’t he do that to begin with? The simple answer is that the excavator arm does not reach that far, we only wanted dirt laying on the North, East, and South, none on the West where we will ultimately need equipment access.
By Wednesday Matt is done with all of the digging and excavating work. I understand that at one point he had to go into Mt. Vernon (1/2 hour drive from Camano) to get new (harder) “teeth” for his bucket.
Thursday, Dan the foundation contractor comes in. He typically works by himself and does the more exacting layout of the footing forms. He spent Thursday doing that and by the end of the day he had finished the rough installation.
Friday was spent on installing the rebar into the footing—cutting, bending, and wire tie the lengths of rebar so it does not lay on the ground. Rebar needs to be suspended in the footing to provide maximum strength.
By Friday, Dan is done and he calls for inspection on Monday with the County—this is the first of many calls that will be made to the county to inspect work on the project. The footings are first and we cannot proceed to the walls until we get the green light. Since Dan does this for a living there is no reason we won’t get approval for pour and that will happen as well on Monday.
Now for some more pictures:
Supervisors
Look ahead preview next week: Concrete walls when the entire job site starts to take shape.
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