November 29, 2005

  • Sorry I did not post this in a timely manner: about a week ago (Monday Nov.21st, while I was in Tucson visiting family) THE CONCRETE WAS FINALLY POURED at 37th Drive!

    Lugo's team did an excellent job, as Bob said:
    ... the slab thickness (can be seen from the photos) is over 12" thick, that's twice the designated thickness. We did that to raise the slab height above the interpolated flood plain (the alley crown). ... Also we poured a whopping 108 yds. of concrete where the plans called for 35! Not to worry Lugo (the concrete subcontractor) saved enough on the forming to cover the change order. Thanks to Lugo and his really experienced workmen. ...also we added #5 rebar which is thicker than the #4 called for on the plans. This was necessary because of the crumpled sidewalk which served as indication aplenty that the soil we were dealing with really was jello. So we beefed up the rebar to give the slab higher yield strength, which adds to ultimate stability.

    The "crumpled sidewalk" he mentions happened when we were trucking in the movie-star dirt and surfer dirt. As one dumptruck backed up the driveway apron onto the lot, the concrete apron and part of the sidewalk crumbled like graham cracker under its weight. That just doesn't happen, not to the degree that it did, unless the earth underneath the concrete is very unstable. I'll post a photo of that too, although it has had a lot of heavy traffic since the first dramatic time it happened, so it's actually been flattened out, unintentionally recompacted.

    For extra torsional rigidity, we were required to have steel shear walls too. Here is the pouring of the attachment plate for one of those shearwall panels:

    ...and Lugo again, smoothing things out:

    At last, it feels (and looks!) like the house is really being built. After a couple of "false starts" (the excavation, the foundation steel, the steel frames... all with so many delays and complications), this might really be the tipping point toward constant forward momentum.

    We shall see!