Stem Wall

Soon after the concrete was poured, our blocks arrived.

The first blocks to be laid! You can see the forms are still on the concrete. Kristi and I stripped them over two days. The first day we got all the easy ones. The second day we worked on the tough ones with sledge hammers, stakes as levers, and jackhammers for the really tight ones.

The first course is coming together here. My job was to bring all the block off the pallets to the interior. We hired professional block layers to set the block.

This is the finished height of the stem wall. It looks taller now than it will after we backfill. Our floor will sit at this level. You can see vents in the wall here, this is for a passive cooling system. I'll get into the details of this in a future post.

This is taken from the inside. The white lines on the wall are to mark the location of the rebar, the dots are where we need to drill for installing hardware to hang the floor. The wood columns are forms that we will pour concrete in for interior footings, they still need more reenforcement.

Concrete

It was an early morning. The first truck showed up at 4:45 am. They were pouring 10 min later. The excavator is just there for the lights.

It was a big scene that morning. We have been doing our best to keep the construction traffic localized to the immediate area around the building site to limit the damage caused by such massive equipment. To be honest, I am quite pleased with the results so far.

Here is the inspector performing a "Slump test." He filled the cone with concrete then removed the cone. Next he measured how far down the concrete fell in relation to the top of the cone. Our concrete fell 3.5 inches. This was good and we passed the test. Over 4 inches and we would have failed.

These cylinders are another test. They are filled with concrete and broken on 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after pouring to test the strength. The concrete we poured was 3000 psi. Everyone on site was confident that it would test stronger than that.

Here is some freshly poured concrete. We poured 42 yards, at 10 yards per truck we had 5 trucks that morning.

Rebar

After the forms are built, in goes the rebar!

Here we have #4 on the right and #5 on the left.

Cutting Rebar.

Kristi is bending rebar into squares. These tie onto some of the footings. Someday, when you are visiting us in our house, I will show you many more pictures of bending rebar into different shapes for different purposes. If you want.

Here is the day of our inspection. You can see the forms for the footings in the center still need to be finished. The rebar sticking up is tied together to hold it in place, when the concrete is poured, it will be straightened out.

This picture is actually from the day we poured concrete. It shows how the rebar is tied together. Underneath the rebar are dobies. The rebar needs to be three inches off the ground before the concrete can be poured.

Forms

After digging out the foundation, the next step is to build forms.

The ground is extremely hard where we are building, but some areas need to be compacted.

The first real step to building forms is finding the corners and making sure everything is square. The guy working the sledge is the infamous Steve of King Concrete.

As you put the stakes in, you also set string lines to mark the outside of the walls. You will notice two parallel strings here, the string in the center is the outside of a wall right in front of the photographer. The string to the right is for a wall at the far end, the string is just extended. The colors of the string do not matter in this photo.

Here is the beginning of the forms. The stakes are pounded in the ground and the form lumber is nailed on. The height of the top of the lumber is critical and constantly adjusted to be correct.

Here you can see both sides of a form. Many stakes are needed to hold the concrete in.

Digging

We have been very busy this last week digging out the foundation.

We rented a backhoe for 1 week. Day 1 went well, with both of us learning how to operate we actually got a lot done. The morning of day 2 The U joint broke on us. We called the rental yard and they came out with a truck to pick up the machine. We rented another tractor with a gannon this time.

Here is the second machine that we rented. This actually turned out to be a good thing as we used the gannon, which is the attachment on the back, quite a bit.

Here you can see things starting to take shape.

We took some time to work on the driveway also.

By the last day we really needed the backhoe again to dig some footings. This backhoe came equipped with an extend-a-hoe. Extend-a-hoe's are very useful and should you ever have the option I highly recommend them.

Here we are on the road back to the rental yard. I took it all the way up to 4th gear!

Electric Panel

After a couple weeks delay, the panel came in. We installed it with little trouble.

This is what the inside of the panel looks like. We had an electrician make all of these connections.

We screened lots of dirt to protect the conduit. After about 1 foot, we ran our phone line and a water line. We screened more dirt then put this caution tape down. At this point we have most of the trench filled in.

Electric trench

Most of our electrical trench is done. We are still waiting for the panel to come in, but that should be soon. Meanwhile, here is some of our progress.

Here is the mini excavator and operator who dug the 200' trench, 3' deep.

This is most of the conduit that we put in all laid out and ready to go. We put in one line for the well, one for the panel in the garage and one for either solar or wind power. We also ran one for an exterior outlet in the yard and an empty line for a future house. Also going in the trench is our phone line and a water line.

Here we are glueing the conduit together.

These poles will be what we set the panel on. The tubes are filled with concrete and then we set the poles in.

It's crazy the things they let you do when you get a building permit. There is 37,500 volts of electricity under this transformer!