Post date: Apr 23, 2015 3:20:08 AM
Wednesday I spent three hours up and down on my knees, removing about 400 screws from the wooden forms. My thighs have never had such treatment, and, boy did they hurt. I had to take breaks for second breakfast, to recharge the battery on my impact drive (twice), eat lunch, and siesta. The crew worked at a neighbor’s house during the morning, giving me time to extract the screws so that their work (requiring more strength than I possess) was more productive.
Even after the form boards were removed there were some remaining screws, and the boards had to be stacked outside of the excavated hole. Then we had to pull all the pegs that held the form boards in position (about 90) and stack them.
Early in the excavation we discovered a 3” PVC sewer pipe running diagonally across one corner of my foundation. The backhoe destroyed about six feet of this pipe, which had never been used. After inquiry I discovered that it was laid for possible future use from the community barn across the street. We didn’t mark the location of the pipe at the time we found it.
This afternoon we spent six man-hours trying to find the broken ends of that pipe — to no avail. The soil had been compacted for my foundation, so the digging was hard and the space cramped between the footing and the walls of the excavation. I finally gave up - and told the crew to quit, too - when a neighbor brought his horse to a pasture he had been fencing for the past couple of weeks.
Then this evening I continued going through the five books that my interior designer had given me to select interior finished, colors, and textures. Since that is not my strong suit, I struggled quite a while and still have two books to go.
Thursday the builder (Eli) and I drove to Santa Fe to pick up the special-order Insulated Concrete Forms (ICFs) from the distributor. The nine pallets fit in his pickup and equipment trailer. Each pallet was about a four foot cube, but weighing only about 60 pounds!
Still, it was a five-hour round trip. By the time we got back, parked the trailer, and unloaded the pickup it was 2pm. His crew was elsewhere and it was too late to bring them in. So we should place the ICFs Friday. Then there is reinforcing steel to be placed within the ICFs.