7.29.2014

Another early morning phone call set the day into motion.  The cold-formed steel for framing the first floor was supposed to arrive today mid-morning.  Jim got a call before 8:00 asking for clarification on directions.  Yet another delivery person without GPS!  Jim and Bryan had to just grab a coffee and a bite for the road and head to the land.

It was a boom truck so he was easily able to unload the steel right where Jim wanted it.



All these materials on site now is pretty amazing!

 

Jim and Bryan spent all morning working on the drain pipes.  From one of the rains, dirt had washed into and around some of the drain pipes.  So they actually took some sections out, cleaned the pipes, dug out the dirt, and replaced it with gravel.  Unfortunately, the Bobcat is now sitting in the middle of the site so they had to use the wheelbarrow to bring gravel over.  It was a lot of work for them but everything is pristine now. 

 

All of the footers are now totally filled with gravel to footer level.  Jim even ran water through and tested to make sure they worked.  The soil is so good that it took awhile before water came out the side drain pipe, but it eventually did.

After lunch, Jim opened up one of the sections of ICF and found that there was an error.  There was miscommunication between Jim's previous rep and the new one and a couple things didn't translate to the right parts.  Unfortunately, that meant Jim spent a chunk of time this afternoon dealing with that problem.  He came up with a way to make the pieces he has work for the most part, so that is a relief.

I spent the afternoon trying to inventory our huge foam piles. Not the easiest job because the stickers on the foam pieces aren't worded to match what was on the invoices.  Plus, some pieces weren't wrapped and didn't have stickers.  Add to the fact that I was clueless about what the different parts and pieces were and it was quite the job.  We seem to be missing a couple of the alignment brackets but besides that, everything seems good.

It was finally time to pull out the ICF design blueprint and start looking at assembling our giant Lego blocks!  Jim gave Bryan and I a Nudura 101 course on some of the basics.  I'm sure there is going to be lots more lessons ahead!

Jim and Bryan carrying over a section of straight pieces.

These ICFs are able to be cut to fit.  You can only cut in certain areas (2" increments) and they have scored lines where you can cut.

Once you get the corners set, you can build a wall pretty quickly!  There are stabilizing clips that you put in when you put two sections together.

Our first wall section!

This was a crazy corner.  Jim's design calls for transitioning from 10" pieces to 12" across the front.  So creative measures have to be put in place to make that happen.

This is a T section block that Jim was assembling.  The opening will be for a beam later on in the building process.

Jim had some more computer work he wanted to do before he progressed too far, so we called it a day.   

It's really amazing how things are taking shape.  For so long, we've been doing really important things to get us closer to these steps but some of those steps are slow-going to see much progress.  Now things change pretty dramatically daily!