Watching Concrete Dry

Well the concrete is in. Three cement mixers full of concrete. They started at 6 am and were done pouring around 9 am. A few more hours of smoothing and polishing and one sunny windy day in Flagstaff!

They poured the game room side first. This is the end of the first truck full. You can see the compacted fill and re-bar in the garage section. There were at least 15 guys out there to make it all happen quickly!

They pumped the concrete up from the road since the front yard is so steep.

The forms around the steel beam hold the re-bar and concrete for the grade beam.

Next they poured the 8 foot flat section in the back of the garage. Several guys worked on smoothing the game room floor while the others poured the sloped portions of the garage.

Two truck fulls are in and they need a third to finish the rest of the two car garage.

The floor slopes to the two drains in the floor under where the cars go.

They sprayed a milky looking sealer on the concrete to slow the drying.

Busy smoothing and polishing.

Later in the afternoon you could still feel the heat in the slab. The garage looks smaller with the slab!

Flagstaff weather strikes again! Unfortunately the concrete dried too quickly and cracks formed all over the game room slab and a few in the garage. They call these hydration cracks which occur when the top dries too quickly. Looks like we can play hopscotch in the game room!


On to framing this coming week hopefully...once we agree on a plan to deal with the cracks.

Preparation for concrete

It's been a busy week! The goal is to pour the concrete slab on Thursday. There was plenty of prep work to accomplish before that could happen though. Here are some photos from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It's great to see so much progress in 3 days. It's been a hot and windy week for the guys working out there...

The fill was delivered on Monday.

The steel beams for the garage were delivered Monday as well.

The sections of the sidewalk where the driveway will be were removed.

Trenches were dug in the fill for the plumbing, floor drains and in-floor heat tubing.

The manifold for the in-floor heat downstairs.

The steel went up on Tuesday. Looks like quite the entrance way! The garage will not fall down...(once we have a ceiling and some walls around it of course)

Andy in his garage (well in the trench that will be filled in with concrete to make the garage floor)

Wednesday was another busy day with the concrete floor crew preparing for the area and Ted working on the in-floor heat for the game room. Kip and Steve were busy keeping track of everything.

We watched from above as Ted and Kip worked on installing the Pex tubing for the in-floor heat in the game room. They were laying out the tubing and attaching it to the wire grid that was placed on top of the insulation blankets.

A few more things to finish up in the morning before they can pour the slab!

Further excavation and clean up

The week was spent working on back filling around the foundation and excavating to remove the remaining rocks in the garage area. We also had the area behind the house dug out to allow for some room for flat yard beyond the deck.

Pondering what to do in the backyard...

We decided to cut back ~20 feet from the house at the deck and then slope that cut to the corners of the house. We're keeping a pile of dirt for our many landscaping projects, but there are still several piles of dirt and rocks to haul off.

The crawlspace was filled in with dirt to make the ground all level inside.

We protected our little Ponderosa pine in the front yard after it had a rough day with the back hoe moving the dirt and rocks around it. Hopefully the wood protects it enough to live through the construction. The tree next to the neighbors house also has a few battle scars from encounters with the back hoe so we protected it.

Some early evening shots enjoying the views from our lot.

Back on track

Looks like house construction is moving in the correct direction again! The waterproofing company came out last week and fixed the job. They scraped off the green foam board from the lower half of the wall and applied another thick coating of the black tar stuff. So with almost an inch thick tar layer, almost the entire foundation was finally waterproof. One little spot was touched up again on Monday and a new layer of foam board was applied to finish it off. Today they put the drain tile back in (and added the drain tile behind the crawlspace that they forgot about last time). The clinkers that the guys dug out of the trench were dumped back into the trench and a new load of clinkers was added as well. The goal is to finished the back filling and remaining grading/excavation so that they're ready to pour the garage slab by the end of next week.

Done for the day, but plenty of clinkers to move tomorrow.

Dirt back fill will go on top of the clinkers to grade away from the house for positive drainage.

The new drain tile for behind the crawlspace.

The clinkers are covered with a protective fabric and then dirt is filled on top.

The dirt and rock piles in front of the house are being pushed around to allow the backhoe to get through. Hopefully most of the dirt will be used for back fill.

Waterproof?

Not it's not monsoon season in Flagstaff yet...but construction progress has gone from a stand still to rapidly moving backward. Things were moving fairly well last week with completion of the block walls and the second round of the waterproofing. On our daily afternoon walk around the lot, we noticed a little puddle of the black tar stuff that seemed to have seeped under the bottom of the block wall. We were curious and asked the builder if that meant that the wall wasn't really sealed if the tar could run from the outside of the wall to the inside. The builder wasn't overly concerned so we decided to investigate further over the weekend.

The little puddle of black tar

Andy shoveled out all of the clinkers (small rocks they dumped in on top of the drain tile) behind the section of the wall where the drip was. We then hooked up a hose to the neighbors spigot and let it run behind the wall on top of the drain tile. A few minutes later we saw water trickling through the wall. Not to the spot where the tar had seeped through, but three other spots a few feet away! This was pretty alarming since those spots appeared to be fine before we saw the water coming through...the natural question was, "how much more of the wall leaks?" Not exactly the waterproof foundation that we paid for!

The water was rapidly trickling through the wall in several spots between the footer and the block wall.

So after stewing over it this weekend, Andy called the builder early this morning to discuss. Steve and Kip were soon out there running water behind the rest of the wall to see how bad the leaks really were. Steve was shocked at the many leaks he found between the footers and block walls. A crew of "Labor Express" folks were out there all day today shoveling out the rest of the clinkers from behind the walls. This is no easy task...it's a very narrow and deep trench between the wall and the cut in the rock. Steve had the waterproofing done in two sessions so that it'd be easier to get the clinkers in over a half built wall instead of a full height wall like we have now.

Buckets and short shovels were scattered around the lot this afternoon. Looks like they at least have another day of digging to go until they expose all of the drain tile.

The pile of clinkers that they dug out today...

We'll see what Steve and the waterproofer come up with for a fix to this one! Another delay in building but this one is worth fixing right to make sure that the basement stays dry (even though we live in the desert, we get plenty of rain to cause a problem during monsoons).


Words of wisdom for those who ever consider building:
#2 - Go ahead and test even the seemingly obvious things about the house yourself. Apparently it's not routine to actually test things like waterproofing. Imagine how bad this could have been had they finished backfilling, grading and started framing! Andy's persistence is good for times like this :)