I came home from my marathon trip to lots of progress! The slab is poured. Here’s a video tour, and – with some imagination – you can begin to see how the first floor will be laid out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hda2WGTW1Sw

And framing on the old cottage is coming along well. The inside is still a bit of a mess, but – again, with some imagination – you can see how it’s taking shape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S_lDcZUqQ

The crew began framing this week, so for the next post I’ll have walls!

I’ve been out of town since the foundation pour, but it’s exciting to see work progressing – Lev is sending documentary evidence of the progress!

After the stem walls cured, and the formwork was removed, the next step was to fill in the areas between the stem walls with layers of rock and gravel. So now it looks like this:

To really see how the foundation is shaping up, take a look at Lev’s video (on my new YouTube channel): http://youtu.be/s7wzh7Cupng

This week Gar – my contractor – will be pouring the concrete foundation slab, which in this house will actually be the flooring for the ground floor. We’re going to dye the concrete a medium charcoal grey. To “finish” the floor, we’ll score it in various places so it doesn’t crack, and then polish it and seal it. Once it’s done, hopefully it will look something like this:

Or maybe like this – here you can see the score lines on the floor:

But that’s getting way ahead of myself. . . Let’s just hope the rain holds off and Gar can pour the slab this week!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I keep promising to post more regularly. But then crap keeps happening that slows down progress – like the city refusing to issue my building permit because I requested an exemption from the requirement to install sidewalks. Yes, the Great Sidewalk War of 2014. More on that in another post, but right now I can’t talk about it. I’ve got PTSD. (Post Traumatic Sidewalk Disorder).

But finally, logic prevailed, and while the GSW rages on, I convinced the city to at least issue a conditional permit that lets me continue building. So, as they say in the construction biz, we’re “out of the ground!” Which means there’s more than just holes in the ground to look at. (Which is another reason I haven’t been posting. Holes are boring.)

We got outta the ground on Monday, October 6, with the pour of the concrete stem walls. It was pretty fun to watch, although it was impossible to get close to the action, partially because the site is so small and packed with equipment that it’s hard to walk around, and partially because I didn’t want to get knocked unconscious by a blow to the head from the big boom swinging all over the site.

When I pulled up, I realized Harold Smith – our local concrete and materials supplier – was on the job:

I’ve been over to their yard a few times, but I haven’t met Harold. Or his son.

So here’s how the foundation pour works. First, the concrete rolls up in a big mixing truck:

I’m not sure how many truckloads we used – maybe 5 or 6? Then the concrete pours out of the mixing truck into a second truck, where a guy stirs it up and feeds it into a pump:

The pump sends the concrete into a hose with a nozzle, which the crew moves around the site using the boom, filling up the foundation trenches. The trenches run all along the perimeter of the foundation, and are shored up by wood forms and filled with rebar:

Sorry, I have no pictures of the filled trenches – I had to go to work.

Once all the trenches are filled, you let the concrete set for a couple days, then you pull away the wood formwork, and then you’ve got foundation walls! Pics of that soon. . .