Adventures in Construction 3: On Solid Ground

It’s hard to believe it’s been a full month since my last construction post … the days are just packed with work and experiencing, and I’ve been juggling all sorts of endeavors – from webwork, to house building, to some portrait painting, to my first ever workshop … I even had a birthday along the way :)

For the building site, this was an especially big week, with two concrete pours on Monday and Tuesday – one for the main crawl space floor, and one for the garage floor. Thankfully, with all of the backfilling done, the concrete trucks could maneuver much more easily, which meant that we could happily leave our wheelbarrows at home. This finally marks this the end of our concrete work, which not only means that we are done mucking around in the mud, but also that we are moving on to working with wood (John’s natural element).

Some persistent rains kept the main floor surface wet for quite awhile, so on Wednesday John ran around buying materials and prepping things. Then we spent Thursday welding, grinding, and painting support posts for our floor joists, and on Friday we installed all of our beams and joists in a long, hot, but fast day’s work. Now we are ready to install plywood for the main floor on Monday, with walls to follow shortly!

Interestingly, we were at just this step around this time last year, building a similar structure for a friend/client in the Adirondacks … we actually laid 28 sheets of plywood on my 28th birthday! The footprint for Renée’s house is larger, though, so it will take us quite a few more than 29 sheets this year….

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Adventures in Construction 2

Week 2 of my mother’s house building involved more concrete work. We rented our forms from a very nice Indian man who had purchased them from a contractor John used to know. I started off the week in the “kitchen”, oiling forms and handing them off to John while he assembled them. Some of the pieces had quite an “antique” finish (to be kind), which meant that they just drank up the oil … these were absolutely some of the greasiest days of my life! On Wednesday John and I worked together, and through some very creative math on his part, we were able to use every last piece that the man owned! We also managed to avoid having to plug in any gaps with plywood. We weren’t ready for our hoped-for Wednesday pour, but we rescheduled for Thursday and everything fit together just fine.

The pour itself was slightly less physically demanding than last week … but no less hectic. John noticed only minutes before the trucks arrived that there was a 2′ discrepancy between his plans and the engineer’s, so he spent the rest of the afternoon worrying that we were building the house two feet too small! (The error turned out to be the engineer’s, and the house is NOT too small). The concrete in the first truck was also a bit wetter than John would have liked, resulting in quite a bit of pressure on our forms. Thankfully we escaped with just a few bulges here and there and no blowouts. And since the trucks could maneuver around better this week, no wheelbarrows were needed – just a few bucketloads here and there to top things off.

On Friday we peeled off the forms in a joyful and effortless two hours’ work, just as cooler weather and a nice rain set in to help the concrete cure. The concrete settled in very well without any voids, and the whole structure looks and feels great. Now after a good cleanup we’ll be able to put the sills in, which is an exciting step. Stay tuned!

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