After a couple of months off, I'm back at it again. This time, my wonderful wife Rachel is helping me. The summer is almost over. The temperatures are cooler. The work is more pleasant. And it's not such a chore when there is more than one person working. I work well with her and I'm thankful to have her helping.
What we're doing now is preparing for the slab. I've done all the sub-floor utility work, and so now we just need to get things ready to pour a slab in the remaining 3 modules. I'll explain later why we do the slabs after the concrete walls and concrete ceiling.
In order to have a standard 4-inch thick slab, and have it cure uniformly, it's necessary to level the sand base for the concrete to be poured. This means setting up a laser level and then walking around the room with a stick (we're using a tamper that helps compact the sand, but has a line on it that we use to tell with the laser if we're low or high in that spot). We rake and/or shovel sand to low spots and rake off areas where it's too high. We're almost done.
As a re-cap, we got the slab in the garage poured a year or so ago. That allowed us to close in the garage and it has been a place that we could lock and secure building materials and tools for the rest of the construction. The remaining 3 modules had more utility work to be done, but we've gotten that done and now we're hoping to pour the remaining slabs in mid-October.
The reason we are doing the slabs now, rather than before the walls and roof were poured, is that with a concrete house, if we had poured the slabs first, then when we put the forms in to hold up the roof for pouring that concrete, the weight of the roof concrete would've definitely broken our slab. To prevent that the walls and roof are poured in one pour. The slabs are poured later.
Anyway, I hope that explains it. I hope to write more as we progress. We took a few photos. Rather than use my fancy camera, we just went in and took a few photos with our new phone cameras. I've posted a full set of photos on my flickr site.
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