More Roof Progress

First of all, it was pretty late before I got out there today, but when I did I was surprised to see a generator in the driveway and an extra truck...  Well, they had increased the size of the crew to more than I could count, perhaps 12 guys??  They couldn't run all the tools off of one outlet so they got out their generator for more power...  They actually could have tapped into the other breakers in the temp pole, but it is a funny looking 220 volt 4 point setup.  I suspect tomorrow they may rig something to use that side of the temp pole as it has a 40 amp breaker in it...

I digress, as usual.  Anyway, massive progress on the roof and down below too.  I love this shot because the house is starting to look like we intended it too, an Italian villa type house in the trees.  Probably that is very cliche to say, but I personally think we are getting it pretty close.

Crawled up on the roof for a moment and looked around.  Any attempt to crawl much farther than what you see here would have resulted in me making an ass out of myself.

They are working on top of the Master Bathroom here.  This is a hip roof, so no gables on this part.  There will be a "cupola" on top of this eventually.

Looking West over the back of the house.

Now looking the same way but underneath the rafters.  This gives you an idea of the headroom for later...  With the 5/12 pitch there isn't really that much room, but you can still navigate from one end to the other.  They will probably install a catwalk through here eventually.

Back outside, the hip roof over the Master Bathroom.

Progress inside too.  They framed in the arch above some cabinets in the kitchen, which is right next to the barrel hallway.  Looks good to me.

Front of the garage.  Notice the smallish gable end here, the stonework will taper down off of this to below, and in it's center will be a large closed shutter, to fake a window.  I hate windows in garages that require window treatments, and then collect dust and bugs.  You have to leave the blinds closed or everybody looks right into your garage.  This way is SO much better.  The 2x2 windows to the left won't need covering, and will let in more light.  The fake window makes everything balance out across the front of the house.  I actually plan on buying some real operating shutter hardware, so when the shutters are mounted, they indeed will be real and operable.  Just always shut.

They also framed in the arch nooks next to the living room fireplace.  And above that they also framed in the coffers for that ceiling.  It turned out really good, but if I posted a picture it just looks like more 2x4's.  These coffers will actually just be drywall with bullnosed edges.  Inside will be cased in crown and then accent colored.  Giant huge fan hanging from the center.

Here it is again... Coming along.  You can click on the picture and it's much easier to see things. 

Tomorrow is a busy day.  The "cornice" is coming, which means the soffit material, as well as the OSB sheathing for garage and rear column arches on the porches.  I plan on being out there early to make sure that all gets parked properly, and then hauling off a load of trash.  Yes, the board pile has grown some...

Oh, the pocket door frames have arrived, and need to be assembled and installed.  I am debating on having the trim guys or the framers do this, or myself?? 

Also have to get some Cedar framing wood for the entryway.  Have to call around for that.  Have a great weekend!

Starting the Roof

Actually, they started yesterday, but I just kept it a secret from you.  This is how it works...  The brave carpenter looks at the plan, gets out his measure and pokes around a bit, then he pulls out his pitch calculator, crawls up on top of all the ceiling joists and beams, and tacks a couple boards in the middle of thin air.  Seconds after that a larger board magically appears into "space" at precisely the place where the top of the roofline will be.  Repeat the adding board process several hundred times... you get the picture. 

There is a lot of things I know about, but this one is a mystery to me.  The carpenters I think kind of chuckle at me when I pull out my flimsy little tape measure to look at things.  They are SO much better and faster at laying things out that I ever will be.  They are also much more precise... They always use a square and mark everything perfectly. 

These boards you are looking at are 32 feet long... I think the corner one is a 2x10 and the lions share of the roof is made from 2x8's.  You can imagine they are not light.  They have a system where they call for boards of certain dimensions and the crew below cuts out everything before it is handed up. 

I bet you from the North are jealous of that blue sky...   It was actually a bit chilly today, though, as the last round of weather had some "nip" behind it.  The crew was almost in short sleeves by the end of the day, though. 

This is the back of the house, which doesn't have as many cuts as the front.

Framing into a valley here.  I suspect the opposite of framing into a peak. 

Front entryway still doesn't look like much, but trust me when I say this will be fabulous when they get it done.  Met with the framing boss today and went over a list of items he needed....  Concrete bolts, Cedar beams, tongue and groove 2x6's, and of course more plywood. 

The frame you see here will all disappear behind stone walls and will be topped with the aforementioned Cedar framing.  The 2x6's will replace standard decking material in favor of it's look from below.

Still not super obvious from the street as to what you are looking at.  Yes, I know that the concrete washout is still sitting there, but I am waiting on it to magically go away...  Perhaps I should take my sledge hammer out there?

Living room fireplace...  No, I didn't trick my wife into carrying that down there.  The framers were nice enough to help.  Took 4 of them plus me.  I was lifting at the center of the bottom, and at one point, a bush got in the way of the guy on my right and he let go for a minute.  I was shocked at how much more weight he was carrying than me....  The weight about poked me into the ground ;-)  Anyway, this is a "click brick" system, which comes with real firebricks that click into the stainless steel liner system, and then get mortared into place.  No visible metal when you are done.  The chimney tapers off the top of the fireplace, and the framers as usual made that happen with grace...

Not sure if I ever posted a picture of the breakfast area, but this is the framed version from the back.  It is the only place in the exterior walls of the house not ICF. 

Barrel hallway that flanks the Powder Room.  You can go go into this hallway, then into the Powder Room, and get powdered.  Reminds me of a comedian that talked about this process, but he used language probably not appropriate for this blog ;-)

My wife will probably kill me (we were dressed for cold and rain and she thinks she looks like the unibomber here).  I try not to include obvious pictures of people or names of anyone in the blog, just to keep everything neutral, but I wanted to show the scale of the Gallery.  She is standing about 50 feet away from me.  The 4x4 posts enter the ceiling at 8 feet high, and the groins top out at about 11 feet.

Maybe I will have more pictures of the roof tomorrow...

We have a meeting to look at some exterior door options tomorrow.   Just as I was ready and insistent to use a couple of exterior Alder doors, my buddy came over and started telling me about problems he was having with humidity and climate changes messing his door up all the time, so we may have to seriously look at some fiberglass doors for these locations...  I have a hunch that a "clad" style door like a Jeldwen would be maybe too much??  Don't know, though.  Will have to make some calls...

We had a couple inches of snow yesterday, which came along with maybe 1/4 inch of rain.   When the whole thing melted this morning the house of course fills back up with water.  The ICF doesn't allow it to drain, so it pools where the slab is lowest, which in theory would be the showers...  I have been siphoning these out when this happens with some tubing, but the showers have been filling up with mud, nails, sawdust, bird poop, and who knows what...  Anyway, a couple of mouthfulls of that and I am still spitting out crap... Think I'll go brush my teeth and head to bed...

Have a great week...

More Ceiling Details

Ok, going to try to write on TOP of the pictures today for a change...  Here is the groin hallway... COMPLETED....  The bottoms of the arches, where you see the little 4x4 posts, are 8 feet above the concrete.  The arches between those columns are 9 1/2 feet, and then the apex of the groin is about 11 feet.  I could not be more happy with how this turned out.  Wifey hasn't seen them in person yet, so she is itching to head out there in a minute and take a look...  What she doesn't know is that I am going to get her to help carry a very heavy fireplace down there and position it... he he...

....click on the picture and it gets big....

This groin is a tad larger than the others, and is in the inside Entry Foyer, it is also a little taller and more square in shape, about 12 feet at the apex. 

Circular double step ceiling in the Dining Room.  I like the way this turned out, but man is it way up there. 13 feet.  Should leave room for the trapeze act during dinner.

This is a decorative cathedral vault in the middle of the kitchen.  Although it looks like roof rafters, they are not, and the roof will be well above this part of the house.  That is a double 2x12 I think at the top.  We will have decorative wooden beams that mimick this pattern actually below the drywall, but they will be much heavier looking than this.  The center of this ceiling is directly over the center kitchen island.... hopefully... 

Finally, they put in the large beams that span across the garage to carry the tile roof load.  They also added an additional beam so they could cut out some of the I joists and give them more "run" distance on the attic staircase.  I blame myself for being a little passive on this one and making assumptions that someone had actually figured this out (plan stage, design stage, and material takeoff stage).  Anyway, it will work much better now and I suspect they will have this staircase in by today.

Thats it... Got to go load up the fireplace and get it out there.  Shipping weight was almost 800 pounds, but a lot of that was the firebrick (it's a click brick system, and the bricks go in later). 

Have a nice day. 

OH, it would be nice to hear some comments from some of you...  Good or bad.  I am curious too as to who is reading this and from where?  I can moderate the comments, but I never get any ;-(

Groin Ceilings

Here it is!!!!  We have been waiting for this moment for a LONG time.   One of the most exciting features of Villa Costo Mucho will be the Gallery, which runs from one end of the house to the other.  There are actually 5 groin ceilings in total.  One is in the front Foyer, which is where I am standing, the other 4 grace the Gallery and will each be cornered with 4 Cantera columns (12 columns total).  Between each column there is an archway, 18 inches wide, which the arches frame a rectangle, and then up inside that rectangle lies the groin ceiling itself... 

A groin is another name for a "Double Barrel" ceiling, which would be the footprint of two barrel ceilings intersecting perpendicular to each other. 

Now, what is so perplexing to me is how the math all works to make these happen...  First, to keep the arches between columns themselves looking correct, the "rise" needs to be the same.  In our case, this rise is 18 inches (all the other arches in the house are generally 8 inch rise).  So, from the 8 foot column, go up an addtional 18 inches and you are at the top of the column arches. 

One would think, then, that you could frame the groin by tucking in the next set of arches from the 8 foot tall corners, traveling straight up into space a fixed amount, say 15 inches, and then repeat the same arches from below....right???  Wrong....  It turns out that if you use the same radius from below, that the concentric arches from below now look to be at a different radius, and thus are not pleasing to the eye...  So the next arch radius up above has to be adjusted with a larger radius, which means the rise from left to right starts out at a larger number (17 inches in this groin), then decreases at center (15 inches), and then increases again to right corner.  To add great confusion, these groins are not square, but rather rectangles, so the short sides of the rectangle have yet another set of radius' which have to be worked out as well....

Oh, we aren't done yet...  Once these corner points and rise have been figured, the actual framing of the groin requires them to cut plywood arches that span diagonal across corner to corner, and meet up in the middle at the apex of the groin.  These are cut at yet another radius, because the span on these is longer yet.    It all has to work perfectly...

My deal with the carpenters was that they would frame one out, and then call us in for a look before they proceed with the others...  Turns out that day I was in Argentina instead, so my poor wife had to go out and make the call.  She was under great pressure...

Here is the view down the long axis.  You can see from this view why we used a larger "rise" on these arches than in the rest of the house.  Had we not, the groins would have been essentially hidden from view and the sightline down the hallway would have been obscured.  In addition, a shorter rise would have meant things would have looked funny from the sides, by funny I mean the ratio of space above the arches in the room to the space below.

I should add that the dimensions of the column bases were adjusted on the "fly" as we framed this all together.  Originally, we thought that 14 inches would be adequate to fit a 12 inch column and it's base, but this would mean no room for drywall and trim...  So, we had to adjust the column base positions and thus the framing overhead to account for a new dimension of 16 inches, but the rest of the house had to stay fixed.  We also had to do all this while maintaining centerline on the entryway door, the courtyard windows, and the doorway that leads into the study.  We were able to do all this by shifting one of the end walls of the gallery east 2 inches.  Unfortunately, this meant that now the column to column dimensions are not all the same, so the poor framers don't now have the luxury of using the same dimensions from one groin to the next, and have to recalculate each one seperately... 

The framers don't have the luxury of grid paper and a compass to figure all this out, they are using tape measures, plywood, and their intellect to figure this out.  The plywood in this case is 1 1/8 inch decking plywood, which is heavy and hard to cut in a radius.  (by the way, they cut the radius with their circular saw rather than using a reciprocating saw, it produces a smoother radius, and they lube the blade with WD40 as they cut to keep the blade from pinching).

To say I am amazed at their talents would be an understatement...  One day they are lifting a 900 pound beam 12 feet into the air by hand, and the next they are using some pretty tricky geometry skills to lay things out... 

Another view down the gallery.  This one shows the ground so it puts things in better perspective.  All the wooden walkways are temporary, and only the 4x4 posts will remain when they are done.  These posts will be surrounded by the stone columns.

This view is from the living room, looking back towards the dining room and foyer entryway.  You can see here that a more shallow arch would have looked too flat.  This ceiling is 12 foot and pops to 13 above me where it is coffered.  The dining room is similar, 12 foot with a 13 foot pop in a double stepped round.  It's all really quite cool...

Carpenters asked me for a bunch more of these joist hangars.  I just about croaked when I discovered the price of these and it's bigger brother ($57 each for the bigger one, which is special order and not even kept in stock, so Simpson has to make it special...a 20 day lead time)...  Forget it, they say they have something else figured out...

Last shot as I was walking away tonight.  As you can see the garage is not constructed of ICF, and thus looks pretty puny in comparison.  By the end of this week, I think you will see the remaining groins in place and the roof will be on.  They call the soffit material the "cornice", which will be mostly constructed of Hardi Concrete boards... I hate to repair and paint wood, and the Hardi board is awesome.  Doesn't rot, and holds paint a long time...

Yes, the trash pile is growing a little bit.  Thanks to my Dad last week we hauled off some really super NASTY "poly" that was coated in muck.  It was just coated in slop and we got it all over ourselves and my old pickup.  The concrete guys had piled it at the bottom of the trash pile, and it was keeping the whole thing from drying out.  These boards should be easy to get rid of in comparison...

Have a great week...

Beams....

Walls are mostly up.  They have the blocking in and a lot of the little decorative items done already.  A couple of days ago, the engineered "Big Beams" showed up.  These had to be shipped through the supplier to my local big box store, and then delivered again to the site.  It was everything that little delivery forklift could do for weight.  His rear wheel was uncomfortably light as he came down the driveway.  The heaviest of the beams I would guess weights close to 900 pounds??  It is 18 inches tall, 5 1/2 inches wide, and 24 feet long.  It took six guys to get it down through the yard, and then they had to hoist it into position by hand.  Can you imagine standing 12 feet up in the air on a 2x4 wall and recieving this beam from below by hand??

This particular beam in this picture is NOT that beam, this one is smaller, and it butts into another beam and will be joined with a joist hanger.  Sure is a pretty color beam against the blue sky.  If you ever come over, and you are standing in front of the cooktop or sink, you are standing under this beam and the thousands of pounds of tile above that it supports... 

Now we go outside.  This is the back of the garage, where the 4th garage door opens towards the little porch.  Much smaller beam which will rest on a corner column. 

These beams are in the Master Bedroom, and flank the barrel ceiling that will be framed above the bed.  That ceiling is now mostly framed, and these beams are joined together again by two more beams that were left over as a result of a little mixup between the beam senders and the carpenters...   Long story short, we had more beams than we needed, so they beefed all this up... 

This is a picture of one of three areas that had no place to rest a beam for support, so they cut into the ICF wall and placed a 2x4 into the wall which will support the weight down all the way to the floor.  They still need to add long tapcons to make this completely foolproof.  They even faced the outer edge with some plywood to make the wood even with the foam before it gets stucco.

Tonight we found out they delivered more lumber, another driveway full of it.  This lumber is for the roof rafters...  The longest board is a 2x8 that is 32 feet long, something like 6 of them.  Didn't even know they made a board like this.... 

They have most of the ceiling joists in place now, and tomorrow they start the groin ceilings...  They will have  a larger "rise" over the arches of 18 inches.  We like the arches better without the larger rise, but that would mean much less visibility from the dining room to the living room, as well as less sightline down through the gallery hallway, which will have iron hanging lights from each  groin.  All in all, 5 groins...  1 in the main foyer, which is slightly larger and taller than the other 4, which flow through the gallery.  The 12 interior columns will all be topped with additional arches that flow from one column to the next.  I will post some pictures if I get a chance and they get that far tomorrow...

Have a great weekend otherwise!

Lumber and Walls

Sorry it's been so long since my last post.  After they poured the ICF walls I instantly had to get busy coordinating all the next steps.  Fortunately, the framers were ready to go as fast as I could get the lumber delivered.  Monday was out of the question, so a few carpenters showed up and marked out where all the walls would be on the concrete floor.  They use string lines and lay everything out, and try to identify problems as they go.  In my case, I was very happy to find that the plumbing all pretty much matched it's intended locations.  Where it didn't, they just shift the wall a tiny bit to capture the pipe (when that is possible).  I was especially happy that my radiant panels all ended up being "spot on."

When the lumber came, we had some issues with the coordination of what to bring, and they brought us too much....  Problem is that we have rain, space, and potential theft issues.  Nothing I could do though, other than delay things by a couple days to sort it out, and nobody wanted to wait.

So, without going into details... This is how the particular big box store handles a large lumber sale...  They don't have the vast majority of this stuff in stock, and certainly not in this quantity, so they order the lumber from a forest product supplier, who handles the delivery.  Some of the delivery comes from the store, and some from the supplier.  Also, we have an engineered beam package that comes from yet a third party, which will get delivered to the store, and then to the jobsite.  Any bad boards or boards I don't use can be returned at the end of the framing period for full credit (they come back and pick those up).  Free deliveries... Not a bad deal...  And, I think we hit the lumber market on it's several year low ;-)

Oh, this is just the beginning.  The lumber piles go halfway down my driveway... 

A few days later, and they had really gone to town.  I have learned to respect the carpenters for their skills.  When you watch them closely, they are extremely efficient.  They have superb math skills, and even better geometry skills.  In addition, they have a 3 dimensional understanding of how every single board fits into the equation.  In my case, there are 6 guys working every day, and amazingly, they don't really have to discuss matters much between them, they just know what to do and they make it happen.  They are expert problem solvers...    In this picture, I had climbed up onto the ICF walls to photograph over the top of things.  In the distance is the kitchen and adjoinging areas, and bedrooms other than the master, which is behind me.  By the end of the day today (3 days of work for them), they were already starting to do decorative items like arches and art niches...

Check out these headers... They were really proud of these and for good reason.  These end garage walls support about 25,000 pounds of tile above them.  These headers are double 2x12's over a single sheet of plywood, which is headered again above to create a giant wooden I beam.  They will not move.  I can already see a problem here, as these garage doors all have lights that extend over them and project from these headers....  How am I going to get a box and wire out there?  It's basically solid wood....  Hmmm.

This is a picture of the double pocket french door header that leads into the study.  The wacky boards that go every which way are just braces and will be removed at some point.  The rain we had on Thursday and Thursday all night was incredible.  Blizzard up in the Metroplex which dumbed almost 12 inches of snow.  We had massive rain.  I siphoned water out of the showers, where the concrete is recessed and the water pools, for almost an hour this morning.  Hopefully things will dry out considerably before next week...

This is Bedroom 2 shower.  Long story short, the wall height at the left (for decorative reasons) is a little stubby 8 footer, so we are limited on height.  If I framed the ceiling level the window would be goofy.  So what we decided to do was put a barrel vault over the shower, then slope the ceiling left to right 8 foot to 10 foot.  In the closet behind me, rather than take the ceiling height to 10 feet, which was possible, instead we dropped it back to 8 feet.... Reason... Well, in adjacent bedroom 3 (my son's room) he wants his traintrack to go around the room above him on a shelf, and into a tunnel in the wall.  So, the height of the shelf can be matched to the height of this ceiling, so the train can head into the tunnel over the top of this closet, and then come out again.  It can all be accessed from the attic in case the train derails or other problems occur. 

More on the window... This window will be a quatrafoil, so don't get fooled by how close the frame is currently to the ceiling.  We plan on tiling the ceiling and the return into the window.  Just don't ask me how.  I still have to get this window ordered, but I am intimidated by the process and not confident in explaining exactly what I need....

Other things... We ordered the fireplaces from an online unit.  I was really dissappointed at the selection and prices I saw locally on these things... Crazy expensive.  So, I found an online site that had superb customer service and knowledge, as well as a nice human on their phone.  We selected a "brick it" masonry fireplace for the living room, which has no exposed metal and real firebrick that you mortar in place.  For the other fireplace, we selected a more rustic type black iron "direct vent" fireplace that has arched doors.  Both will look great.  I am installing them personally, with some help, as they are heavy (800 pounds or so between the two).  I had to get my roofing guy to promise me he would handle the flashing at the top of the chimney chase, which is something I wouldn't dare touch...  My karma isn't that good.

I am finding this time in housebuilding to be expensive.  We have paid for everything behind us, now we are buying massive quantities of material (lumber, windows, pocket door frames, fireplaces, and soon roof tile) as well as paying some labor charges. 

On a seperate note, I asked my framer how to handle the ceiling in the outside front entryway, and casually asked what it would take to frame it out in exposed cedar.  He was excited to do it that way and will get me a lumber list.  Also, he is going to tie all the rafters down for wind.  This particular framer normally frames down on the coast and is very adept at framing in wind zones.  We are not in a wind zone, but it would be nice to have that peace of mind...

For some reason, it always feels like all you do is run into problems.  But it's kind of cool how everything always works out.  I would add that the reason it works out is because so far I have been fortunate to find really good crews.  I hope this continues.

If you are building a house, and think you can plan out all the details to the point where you don't have changes....  I can assure you that you will never start your project.  We have exhaustingly planned this house and yet we make changes every single day...

OK, until next time...

ICF Day Pour

Well, to start the day off, I think I mentioned in my last blog about "forgetting" something... Yes, to say the least...  After about 36 hours with very little sleep, I am in bed at about 1AM thinking about the next day, when I realize something, I have forgotten to put in any penetrations for all the GFI outlets that are around the house.  Also, the penetrations for the outdoor kitchen sink water supply, and the outdoor kitchen propane supply... 

This guy is an idiot, you are saying...  Well, hmmm...  yup...

So that certainly doesn't make me sleep any better.  Even though I know it's not a really big deal to drill holes for these things through the concrete.  It's something that's really not that hard to fix. 

So, despite the lack of sleep, 30 degree temp, extreme darkness, and the mountain lion spottings I have heard so much about...  Off to the lot at 4 AM. 

This is, of course, after I try to fashion a piece of 3/4 inch schedule 40 into a drillbit, by creating teeth in one end, and gluing an endcap on the other with a 1/4 inch bolt drilled through the endcap.  My thinking I can hook my cordless drill up and pop holes through the styrofoam nice and easy...  Well, what I end up doing was somehow slicing the top of my thumb down across my fingernail with a drillbit... Ouch...  Blood...  What does this do to attract mountain lions??

Ok, screwed that thing up because the bolt wasn't centered in my haste, and that was the only 3/4 end cap I had in my garage... 

So it's cold, dark, lonely, things are blowing around in the darkness, I am hunched over my bloody pipe with my back to the woods (mountain lion).  I figure at any second he is going to take a bite out of my ass...  It's just like my childhood fear of the "Deeps," which in my child's mind was your basic standard PO'ed buffalo... who had figured out a way to get under my bed.

I think you get the picture...

Oh, I ran my skillsaw every once in a while to keep the critters at bay...  Do not EVER walk up behind a guy on a cold moring at a jobsite who has a skillsaw in his hand, you have no idea what he is thinking...

Anyway.  I am done by 6 AM so I head back home to roust the kids out of bed so they can head to school...  I am much braver when I am a Dad, and even braver with the sun up...

Yes, another pumper truck.  Here he is stretching out to make sure he can reach the back walls.  Actually the other side walls in this case.  He is about 2 foot short on the master bedroom walls.  So the ICF crew gameplan is to attach a long rubber feeder hose to the pumper outlet, then they can pull that out to close the gap while they pour that wall.  In addition, they have attached an S shaped piece and a flow restrictor above that to help slow down the concrete as it comes down the pipe.

I had thought that the far walls would be the most problematic.  But in fact, nothing is easy in the concrete business.  Illustrated here is when they are pouring fairly close to the pumper.  Over 135 feet of boom, 70 feet up, and 70 feet down..  Yes, fairly soupy concrete falling down a 70 foot slope into a relatively flimsy foam form (even though the foam is pretty dang tough).  To make matters worse.  They are filling fairly little spaces, like maybe only a few feet above the top of a window.  So what happens is that you are fast running out of places to put the concrete, and yet you have 70 feet of it still to come...  This can make for a mess. 

They poured the forms in basically two passes.  1/2 of the wall at a time.  There are lots of reasons to do this.  The most important is that the pressure of concrete is tremendous, so the bottom of the forms are under a lot of stress.  Also, the bottoms of the windows have an access channel in them that can allow the concrete to bubble out.  By letting the bottom half of concrete set somewhat, these issues are greatly reduced. 

This is the bottom of the window.  The channel is there so they can make sure the forms get full of concrete underneath the window itself.  You can see a little 2x4 sitting there.  I was wondering what these were for until I saw them in action.  As the concrete comes roaring in, and eventually up and out of these channels, they shove the 2x4 down into the channel between the webs to stop the flow.  Sometimes they do this in time, and sometimes not.  What you see here is a minor mess compared to others...  Don't worry, though, the concrete that gets spilled all gets cleaned up...  The ICF crew brought some extra guys that day.  There is a lot to do behind the scenes, and everybody played a part.  Matt was manning the pump hose and directing things (it was loud everywhere, so there is shouting in at least 2 different languages, and sometimes choice words are spoken).  Matt's right hand man was relief pitcher on the hose, and scanning ahead and behind for obstacles.  The other full time ICF guys were behind the operation adjusting the bracing to get the walls plumb and straight.  Yes, you can move a 20,000 pound wall.  More crew behind them constantly cleaning and working the windows.  The pumper truck guy is right there with his remote control unit, and very precise I might add.  The concrete truck driver is adjusting the flow of concrete from his truck to keep the hopper full.

It's like a concrete orchestra...  Directed in a working man's style, and accented with a Spanish cuss word or two...

OH, my part was to worry about stuff.  So I worried about the road, worried about the weather, worried about the guys falling off the platform, worried about blowouts... All the while I held a shovel (OK, sometimes I helped clean up concrete spills).

There was absolutely no chance that mountain lion was going to approach this operation...

Wait... This pumper boom looks different, you say... Yes, a very precise observation.  Indeed, our first pumper truck had a boo boo and had to go home.  Leaving me an extra 1/2 yard of concrete in my washout to deal with, and the ICF crew an extra 2 hour day while waiting for the new pumper to be flown in from Houston.  The second pumper, also a German, worked sooooo much better.  Here, you can see the little arrangement of S, restrictor, and hose at the end.  They are between trucks here and pouring the first round of the Master Bath, which was the 14 footer.

Here I am standing in the same spot.  Just moved the camera down so you can see where all this is coming from.  The wall in the distance is the 10 footer that seperates the garage from house.  Pretty much blocks the view of concrete pumper and truck.  Thus the reason for the pumper operator to be on remote control so he can see the action on this end... As well as have nice polite discussions with the crew about things ;-)

So, I am of course obsessed about my road.  Why?? Because it is the supply line for everything that happens here.  The second pumper truck was an additional 2x pass at 100,000 pounds, plus the 7 concrete trucks at 10 cubic yards each.  The road held up pretty good.  At the end of the day, I was able to move the stiff concrete from the washout into the ruts, which will further support them for whatever happens next (lumber and hungry carpenters).  Then, when the 2nd pumper left he dumped his hopper right in the center of my road, which allowed me to shovel that around here and there.  By tonight (I write this a day later) I could move things around with a shovel and get them pretty flat again, as we are expecting mucho rain tomorrow, I would rather it didn't pool in those tracks...

Matt and crew came back today bright and early and worked all day to remove bracing.  They left at the end of the day almost finished, and will be back Saturday to do some final touchups... The conrete walls by my eye appear extremely straight, and I could even put a level on them and check them for plumb, but neither matters, for these walls can only be moved by whatever lies below... 

A special thanks to Matt and his ENTIRE crew.  Proactive, thinking, problem solving, professional, hard working, I could go on... 

How about a picture of that mountain lion...  Here he is... disguised as a gypsy..  He is hungry, though, and for any future contractors that litter on the job...  Know that this attracts mountain lions for sure...  Mountain lions can't roar like other big cats, they kill in complete silence ;-)

ICF Pour Tomorrrow

Well, actually today, because I am staying up too late as usual...

So, here are a few pictures, and off to bed for me.

Concrete at 0830, and I am worried about my road as usual.

I haven't posted current pictures in a few days, but they have mounted a wooden walkway all around the outside bracing.  This will allow them to walk the pumper snout around up there.

Yesterday, they finished bracing everything.  They installed wooden end caps where the height changed or ICF stopped, foam adhesive in all the cracks or holes, and squared and glued in all the bucks.  Today I spent some time just verifying that everything was in place and square.  Also, they had cut a few penetrations for me for a fireplace vent and a bathroom vent fan.

I know I am forgetting something, but we pour anyway....