It’s been a couple of weeks since the last update so I thought I’d throw out a teaser on the progress with the first floor framing. The walls are almost all up and most of the 2nd floor joists are in place. Here is what it looks like from the side: And from the top:Read more about First floor framing update[…]
The pouring of the basement slab is somewhat of a milestone, as it means we are close to getting out of the ground and building up. The concrete team has been working for weeks to prep the basement floor for the slab pour. The floor started out with just bare dirt, the interior wall footings,Read more about Basement slab[…]
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[…]