Finishing the floor and the pour

Kaila and Kenny installing our temporary mailbox at the new house construction site. Instead of changing our address multiple times, we decided to just put a mailbox up at the new house location and not get mail at the rental house. When we get the sewer and water lines installed and final gravel on the driveway, we'll put in a more permanent mail box in a better location. This one's pretty far from our driveway and a touch over on our neighbor's property.



The pics here show the contractor pouring the last bit of concrete for the first floor and finishing the surface. I think we are stopping by the site today to see how things look after a few days of curing, so I'll try to post more photos later too. Just a sidebar to the story: it was soooo hot the day they poured, that they started at 6:00 am. I was surprised that we could get the crew, concrete, and pumper truck there all that early, but everyone was great and accommodating. Evenso, the concrete set up so quick that they didn't have time to get all of our anchor bolts set in, so we'll have to use an alternative type of anchor bolt that's drilled in during framing instead.

As always, we'll keep you posted on the progress! Hope you enjoy the pics. As always, comments and questions are welcomed. Many of you have said that it's difficult to register to leave comments here, so if you'd prefer, you can email me at nuttergreenhome@yahoo.com Thanks!

A house to sell, a house to rent, and a house to build . . .

We just closed on the sale of our old house, so we're really happy about only having to deal with 2 houses instead of 3! Our only problem is that our rental house is for sale and there's a showing today. We are sooooooo hoping it doesn't sell - it's been on the market for a really long time, so we took the risk. The owner said he won't take less than his asking price, and if it does sell, he'll refund all of our rent and help us move. It sounded like a good deal until the realtor called wanting to show it one day after we moved in. There couldn't be a worse time for this house to sell! Oh well, we'll just have to wait and see - although you can bet I'm not going to go out of my way to make the place look good!

We finally have Internet at the rental house now (Kaila calls it the "Middle House") so here's a new update. We had a busy week - moving, closing on the sale of our old house, and working on the new house. Below you can see the concrete and pumper trucks on site. We had a total of 8 trucks of concrete come to the site that day - over 70 yds of concrete.
Here is a close up of the pour into the ICF walls around the stair opening. This is a look at the forms and blocking in place with rebar before the concrete. You can see all of the blocking for the areas that we need to keep concrete out of - such as where our heating and cooling system registers will go on the first floor.
Another shot of pouring into the ICF wall. I'll add more pics of the floor pour and finishing above in another post. Thanks for reading.

Lots of rebar and some blocking

Just some pictures from today - not much to say about them. Today Kenny worked with the crew laying and tying rebar to prepare for the concrete pour. They added more support below the suspended floor forms, and tomorrow they will add blocking where we need to keep concrete voided out of certain areas such as our mechanical chase and heating registers. We're moving tomorrow and our internet service at our rental house won't be turned on for a few days, so I'll update again when we get settled. Enjoy the pics!

Suspended Concrete Floor Forms Are Up!!!!

We went to the site today and things are really starting to look good. The crew was able to get the suspended concrete floor forms up yesterday, and it's really starting to look like our house now. You can see the forms from the top view in this picture I took standing on top of a dirt pile. They will come in and pour concrete over the forms early next week. You can see the supports at the top of the ICF walls to hold it so that it doesn't bow out when the concrete is poured.

Then you can see the view from under the floor forms. This is basically exactly what our basement interior will look like - except that all of the supports you see will be removed once the concrete cures. The basement will be one open space with no columns interrupting the space. You can see the opening for the stairway to the left. These interior pictures were taken from the outside of the basement egress window on the west end of the house.

Here is Kenny walking in front of where our shed will be. You can see we've laid forms for the concrete floor of the shed, and right behind that - just off our property - there is a young baseball team sitting in the shade. When I climbed to the top of the dirt pile to get these pics, several of the players were over on our side of the property peeing along our shed base! We had to go and let their coach know (again - since this is an ongoing problem) that this is a dangerous construction site that children shouldn't be playing on. The baseball kids are used to having free reign on our property since it's been vacant for over 25 years.

Our neighbor then told us that there have been people on the site with children during the week - letting them play on the back hoes and excavating equipment. Not cool. I'm glad we have insurance! I don't even let my own kids on that equipment - even for pictures. I can't wait until we are on-site more doing more of the work ourselves. At least one of us is there nearly every day, but not usually for long periods of time. Appartently the issues are in the evenings and on weekends, so hopefully when we get moved into our rental and the house is framed up, we'll be able to work there more on weekends and evenings.

We'll get some more pictures posted after they pour the concrete! We also close on the sale of our house in Florence on Friday, so we'll officially become Ohioans then. Until next time . . .

More fun pics . . .

The suspended concrete floor forms are shown here stored on site - the crew was supposed to be putting them up today, so we'll go there tomorrow to get more pictures. Kaden and Kaila had a great time playing in our HUGE piles of dirt. They are learning a lot and exploring their new surroundings - including all of the bugs, butterflies, etc. Thanks for reading and we'll try to get some new pictures up as soon as possible. Thanks!

ICF finished and suspended concrete flooring on deck

So we had some additional clearing to do, so here you can see Kenny and I each having our turn with the little back hoe that we rented. There's thick brush (honeysuckle) pretty much everywhere where there isn't dirt, so we had to clear a spot for our shed. We wanted to get the shed in so that we have some storage there - on location.

You can see here that the ICF is all formed up and ready to go. The rest of today the crew spent setting up reinforcement for the suspended concrete floor forms. We left earlier today before the floor forms were up, so we're going there tomorrow for more pictures that I'll post tomorrow night. You can see the basement window locations on the far side, and there's an egress window just out of the picture to the right. The crew hopes to pour conctrete on Tuesday depending on the weather. I'll post a few more above of the kids - they had a riot playing in the dirt, but we found a tick on the back of Kaden's neck. It came right off, but it freaked me out!!!

After use by a few fully-loaded concrete trucks, our driveway was in pretty bad shape. So yesterday Kenny, the kids, and I went to the site to work on it. Well actually Kenny worked while we watched and took pictures and video. We rented this small back hoe and "re-tooled" the gravel. Essentially, the concrete trucks left some pretty deep ruts in the gravel and all of the rock was piled in the center, so as you can see from these pics, Kenny just skimmed the high points of rock off the center and to the sides. It worked really well. We also moved some rock from the middle parts of the drive to the front entrance near the road, and back to the turn around area by the house

Kenny had fun - eventhough it rained. The kids were really good - they love playing in the front seat of the truck, although they almost locked me out once (now I take the keys with me!) After we finished at the site, we went to our rental house to clean and get ready to move in. We sold our house in Florence and are supposed to be out between the 18th and 23rd of June - like next week! We are pretty happy, the house was only on the market for about 2 weeks, and only about 11 days of that was really advertised. This week, we're working on finishing up the ICF forms and suspended concrete floor forms. We also need to decide on a lumber package too. So many things . . . Thanks for reading!

Sub-Slab insulation and a Basement Floor

Again, these pics load with a mind of their own, so this time they are in reverse order - oldest at the bottom.
Above you can see the finished basement floor that was poured today. The pic below shows the concrete beginning to be pumped in.
The two pics below shows the very important Insul-Tarp product laid out. This insulation provides a barrier below the basement slab and an R-Value of approximately R-10. You probably can't see from these pics, but another important detail is the spray-foam insulation that the contractor sprayed between the footing and the ICF form.


Before the Insul-Tarp was laid, we also had the site treated for pests - which is a requirement here.

Ready for inspection . . .

Here's the plumber getting everything ready for inspection. These pics are from yesterday (May 31st) and the inspection was scheduled for today, June 1st. Kenny is stopping by the site on his way home today to see if we passed the inspection.

Again, is it a house or a pool?

Above, you can see gravel is finished and two courses of the Insulated Concrete Foundation system is in place (now it really looks like a pool to me!). The bottom rows of ICF were placed so the plumbers can establish where the sub-slab plumbing needs to go. Below, you can see how the gravel was shot into the hole - pretty cool ay? (I'm not sure why these pics keep loading in the wrong order!) By the way, these are some nice pics and camera angles, Kenny. Good work!

Above, the plumber and his assistants place the sub-slab plumbing. The pic below shows the plumbing almost ready for inspection. The bottom pic should actually be at the top, since it's before the ICF forms were placed - as I said, I can't figure out how to get these to load in order. Oh well.