After the graders finished digging the trenches we had good news. It looked like since there weren't any major boulders to deal with as we had feared, we could dig out the whole basement level and add a significant amount of square footage. It hadn't made sense to engineer the plans for this until we knew if it was possible so, now the plans had to be adjusted by the engineer.
Jeff discussed the changes with the engineer and he said no problem he'd have it done soon. Great! Well, of course, his idea of soon and our is not quite the same. After he finally did the work there were a few more adjustments required by the city, back and forth, and waiting, which became very time consuming.
Eventually, we had the go ahead to build the footings. After contemplating building them ourselves in efforts to get things done asap, we decided to hire a local concrete contractor to build the foundation. Once starting on it, he was done within a day or two.
Now to pass inspection by the city...
Well, we failed the first footing inspection, with amounts of rebar and depth of trenches being not quite right. Jeff was given a list of things to fix and he got busy buying more rebar, digging and adjusting things. I was able to help one day, tieing rebar and measuring, as we worked to get the back wall footing to measure just right.
Finally, we passed the second inspection, got the plans stamped, and had the go ahead to pour concrete. Of course now, we had to work into the concrete contractor's schedule, which ate up another week and a half, but July 8th, the day finally arrived to pour concrete!
Wow, we have a foundation! Next, building the basement walls using insulated concrete forms (ICFs).
No comments:
Post a Comment