Concrete in the basement walls..

We've been in a deep freeze the last few days, miserably bone chilling cold with a high of -15 but they managed to get the basement walls filled with concrete. The Bay out there is soooo cold there is frozen mist rising off it.

 First the guys filled the sections under the basement windows.

Adam came behind trowelling the cement off level..

With the floor frame in it was easy to walk around filling up the walls with the big hose from overhead. The other guy in the pictures is operating some sort of remote control that controls the rate of flow of the cement.

I took a picture looking down inside the forms of the back basement wall. You can see where the L bolts are sticking through from both sides. Some are holding the ledger 2x12 in place that supports the floor frame and from the opposite side those are the bolts through the LVL beam that was holding up the old part of the cottage. So when the form gets filled with concrete all these L bolts are in there solid and tight, binding together the old and new parts of the house .

Those pipes will allow heating and ventilating systems to pass through.

Tonight we are waiting to get slammed by our first major snowstorm with high winds and 35mm of snow...bad timing with us ready for backfill and grading and septic tank work. Well whatever comes we'll just have to work around it somehow....

Oh, and those snowflakes falling in the first picture above....I have NO idea how that happened !

Ready for concrete..

There's so many details to look after before the basement walls are poured. The guys have put the rest of the floor frame in place and the big beams to define the stairwell, and have carefully straightened and braced the wall forms plumb and level. Everything that has to be bolted into or passed through the concrete has to be planned for at this point.There are vent pipes for the air exchanger and future heat pump, conduits for outside electrical, outside water tap, and anything to be bolted on later needs its bolts in place now. Above, the guys are lining up the roof parts for over the basement door in order to mark the spots on the foam where the L bolts will go through into the concrete. These are the roof supports I was building in the workshop back near the beginning of this blog.

Because the grade level will be just under the front basement windows we will need retaining walls to contain the gravel and dirt away from the door. I'm recycling some of the pressure treated decking and 2x8's taken off the old cottage, into low walls for this purpose.

Ryn is always there to offer encouragement and to be in the way...

Here comes the floor frame...

The walls are dead level, the 2x12 ledger boards are attached, joist hangers nailed on with a gazillion stubby hanger nails, floor trusses cut to the exact length and are now being installed in the joist hangers. These web trusses are a great idea as ducting, electrical and plumbing can pass right thru the webs without having to drill holes.



Tomorrow they'll be putting on the subfloor so there is somewhere to stand to steer the next load of concrete into the walls. Before that happens all the passages through the concrete have to be thought of and accomodated. There will be conduit passing through for outside electrical connections for lights, pvc for an outside water tap, and galvanised vent pipe for the future heat pump and air exchanger. Easier to plan these now than drill through concrete and steel rebar later.

    The weather has been erratic as usual with 2 miserable rainy days  this week and another coming tomorrow, but yesterday was glorious and calling us to walk down to the beach..

Last weeks wild storm has brought in a deep layer of sand, covering most of the smooth shiny pebbles.

Hole-in-the-rock was half buried in new sand, which we'll likely have til the next storm takes it somewhere else.

How blessed we are to have all this beauty a short stroll away...

Drainage Accomplished

Lots of work on the drainage system yesterday, more hand digging behind the back footing to get the pipes low enough and connected to the original house drain pipe.

Truckloads of gravel came to cover the pipes all round and the guys were glad to see the end of hand shovelling at the back footing for a while. The way this will work is that the back wall will rise to touch the LVL support beam with the outside foam layer. At that point there will be huge L bolts driven thru the forms into the beam so that when the cement is poured it encases the bolts, tying the two buildings together tightly and supporting the weight of the front of the old part of the house.



Jimmy was promoted to Sanitary Engineer ( he preferred Chief Sh*t Shoveller) and tasked with cleaning out the remnants of the septic tank gunk. In the photo he is yelling "Hurry up and take the damn picture, There's sh*t running down to my glove !

The floor was levelled with the addition of gravel and a tamping machine.

So here's how we are today, ready for walls to rise on monday..

The ICF Footings are in.... and The Law Of Building and Renovating

 Massive amounts of dirt have been re-arranged and an extra ditch out the front seemed a good idea seeing as how much water flows under and around the house site. John advised getting solid white perforated drainpipe rather than the old flexible black snakey stuff, to avoid the possibility of crushing under the weight of the backfill...oh my ! what a shock the price of that was, but we got it and I will remember fondly how pretty it is after it's buried out of sight.

Yesterday we had extra help to assemble the footing forms

which was much appreciated.

There is a Law of Building Stuff that says: Unexpected snags are bound to happen. Everything will cost more than you think it will. Things will take longer to do than you think they will. Well it's not really a Law but it should be because it's nearly always true.
The first time I saw this Law in action I was about 12 and Dad had just laid up the concrete wall for our house, and my brother who was just learning to drive, accidently backed up the truck and flattened the wall...Growing up to build things all my life I've seen this Law in action many times.

So late yesterday it became apparent that the corner

where the footings began was a few inches too high and of course that had to be the shale rock corner not the softer corner so today our valiant crew did a lot of pickaxe and shovel work and have now got the whole business lowered and leveled. Tomorrows challenge will be to engineer the step footing for the basement front door.

Yesterdays beautiful sunset here...

Starting to Look Like a Building Site

The Integraspec system has arrived, among a whole bunch of other stuff. This is an insulated concrete form system that when assembled and filled with concrete will give us walls with an R-22 value before the outside sheathing goes on.

 Our contractor, Ben, assembling some of the foam blocks to show how a corner goes together.