After a cold winter, we're anxious to get back to work on the house. We have a number of goals to accomplish before next winter. We want to get the roof waterproofed and bermed once and for all. We want to close the house in and get the exterior doors and windows installed. To that end, we've begun taking bids on doors and windows and I've put in an order for the steel framing material that we'll use to close in the openings in our concrete structure.
Rachel and I installed hangers in the garage so that we can finally make our "warehouse" a little more useable. The floor space had been used up by various building materials and having the wall set up for storage, this frees up some of our floor space for other things. If we're going to be moving forward this summer, we'll need to utilize our space more efficiently.
We have more to do in the garage to reclaim floor space and store away the materials we have in a better way. Hopefully, we wont allow the storage area to be used as inefficiently as we allowed before.
Hopefully, in a month or so, I should be able to report progress again. We'll see.
Showing posts with label house construction "concrete house" "earth home" "earth-sheltered" "terra-dome". Show all posts
Showing posts with label house construction "concrete house" "earth home" "earth-sheltered" "terra-dome". Show all posts
Monday, April 4, 2011
Friday, October 8, 2010
2010.09.10 - Back On Track
Friday, Sep 10, 2010
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.
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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