The excavation contractor worked on a the back fill last week. This is the filling in of the space between the outside of the basement walls and the top grade of the lot. As complete, the waterproofing looks like this. At the bottom is the French drain tube. First they drape a fabric down theRead more about Backfill[…]
The plumbers are pretty much done with the rough plumbing that needs to be embedded under the basement slab. This is all sewer as the hot and cold water pipes are much smaller and can be embedded in the walls, floors, ceilings, etc. In the basement itself we have two full bathrooms, two sinks inRead more about Roughing in the plumbing[…]
I mentioned the large pile of back fill dirt in the discussion about waterproofing. We can’t get rid of that pile until we do the back fill, which is waiting on the waterproofing to finish. But, because of that pile of dirt, we can’t get a crane in place to drop in the structuralRead more about Site limitations[…]
Since we did the basement pour almost three weeks ago, we have been focused on two things, waterproofing the outside of the basement walls, and roughing in the plumbing that will go underneath the basement slab. We’ll talk about the pluming in the next post. While we don’t seem to have a lot of moistureRead more about Waterproofing the basement walls.[…]
The concrete team has spent the last few weeks building the forms and the steel reinforement for the basement walls. Unlike most residential construction, rather than building custom forms from wood, they are using prefabricated forms. The pour went a little quicker than the footings. For the walls, they want the concrete to be aRead more about Pouring the basement walls[…]
Yesterday felt like a real milestone, with the pouring of the concrete for the foundation footings. Here are the footings before the pour. We did a little ceremony to “bless” the foundation to mark the beginning of our new house. Once the pour started it took 6 or 7 hours and went smoothly; concrete trucksRead more about Pouring the footings[…]
I was surprised when I saw the extent to which they dug footings for the foundation. A quick review of the foundation plans shows that there are quite a few load bearing walls in the basement that require footings. We are still scrambling to nail down the details of all the plumbing that will needRead more about Foundation footings – planning for future efficiency and conservation[…]
Excavation took about twice as long as expected due to all the rocks we encountered. The amount of rock (beautiful, valuable, Santa Barbara sandstone) was just astounding. We didn’t realize (despite seeing the huge pile grow) how much rock we pulled out until we did a rough estimation of the weight of all the rockRead more about Excavation is complete[…]
I talked about how many rocks we were uncovering during excavation of our basement. In the last few days we’ve watched them tackle the really big ones, that the excavator can’t budge. Now that rock was a monster. When we dug back, it not only exposed 10 feet of depth, but there were two veryRead more about Big big rocks[…]
We always knew there would be rocks in the dirt, we just weren’t fully prepared as to how many. Our initial estimate was to remove 1800 yards of material from the ground. We are done tucking dirt away now and have taken 1200 yards. That means we’ve also moved about 600 yards of rock andRead more about Rocks, rocks, and more rocks[…]