Hopefully, this will pretty much be the last post in FOOTERS AND FOUNDATION! We poured the slab today starting at 5:30 am. The trucks started arriving at 6:00 am and the work went well. I would love to post all the pics, but I am opting to do just a few to save space.
WHEW! Slowly but ever so surely, we are moving towards our 6:00 am Friday deadline of pouring the slab! Below you will see a couple of pics - one is of me running a "WACKY PACKER!" I ran this over the entire foundation twice. Then I raked down the powder it left behind. The day after I did this we had a little shower that settled that down real nicely as well. The second pic is after the whole thing had been packed.
Tuesday morning at 5:30 am I went over and dug the last interior footer. It took about 1:45 minutes. I still made it to the office by 8:00 am. Then Tuesday evening we got the supply water line run - more kickers installed to brace the 2x12's and we started unrolling and pre-cutting wire for the foundation. We bent all the rebar for the blocks that run over into the slab.
Tomorrow (Thursday) will be a work until we are done evening. (we have two sets of lights now). We will be laying down plastic, putting down wire and tying up rebar. We will have one or two kickers to put in and we have one more form piece to put in for my garage door.
TODAY - Wednesday - the Terminix guy comes by to pretreat for termites!
Well, I have taken three vacation days to get my plumbing laid in and to get my interior footers dug. As usual, I cannot get access to an excavator, and being rather impatient, I just got started by digging by hand. I have nearly completed the project today so far as the digging goes.
For the last hour it has been raining and I am not sure what impact that has had on my work. Here at our house, it has only rained 1/4 inch. So, I am hoping that if it stops in the next hour, that the ground will soak it all in pretty well. Should make it easier to finish getting everything dug down an inch or two here or there.
Here are couple of pics.
This afternoon we hauled in 5 loads of dirt to fill the interior of the chain wall to slab height. You can see the insets for porches and the garage - which are lower than the house floor. We have it level enough to dig plumbing and to dig interior footers for load bearing walls and the porches.
We started laying block on Friday! It was a 12 hour day - 5:30 am to 5:30 pm. My daughters helped. My number one block layer, Robert, was there with his son Drew. Mark also came out for a couple of hours.
We layed around 200 blocks and have about 84 more to go! Below are a few pics. I purchased a canopy to put over wherever we were putting down the block! It was a life saver! There was a hot sun all day - and a good breeze too. Working under the canopy enabled us to stay with it to the end of the day!
Here is an update! This week the sand for mixing mortar arrived at the house site - along with the blocks.
This afternoon we poured the footers and I have to say - we had some excellent help! Being mostly level with no step-downs in the foundation is a blessing! We had to get one shirt-tail more of concrete so a second truck came. There was enough left over to replace pavers in front of my shop door with a concrete pad - the last pic below! And, you can see that even Kelsey got into the act by helping us position block around the footers.
On Saturday morning, May 24th, we put the rebar in the footers and on Monday, May 26th we set the grade stakes. I went out early on Saturday and got started. Andrea and Kelsey came a bit later and finished placing the hangers and the rest of the rebar in the footer ditch. I came along behind them tying it all up and bending the corners. It took a while - and it was over 90 degrees! The gnats were thrown in for free!!!
The rebar ties all the concrete together and provides strength to the load of the exterior walls.
In two of the corners, the rebar ran out to the end, so it was easier to just start a new run overlapping. Here I had a short run coming into the carport area - so I took a hack saw and sawed about 3 minutes - that got me half-way through - then you can just break off the rebar.
Below are a couple of pics with the grade stakes. They are placed about 8 feet apart and we have them tapped down to 16 inches below the string.
This was the first run of footers. The dirt is "hard as concrete" red clay. I could not get an excavator at the time that had a smaller bucket, so I took a garden tiller - narrowed it in to 15 inches - and began to break up the ground about 4 inches deep at a time. I would then scoop this out - widen out the ditch by shovel and sharpshooter, and keep up the process until I was 18 inches wide and 24 inches from the ground to the string! It took a while!!!! (about 3 weeks!) I have 230 linear feet of footer!
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