Fixed and ready to pour

The solution to the misplaced wall was to remove take down the Integra-spec, remove the outside of the Form-a-drain, route new Form-a-drain to the correct dimensions, and lay rebar in the footing.  

 Here you can see the incorrect footing with one side of the Form-a-Drain removed.  Also visible is the rebar where the new footing will be poured, and some supporting structure to stabilize the ICF wall.  The footing and wall will be poured at one time, making a very strong structure.  This corner of the house will have an extra wide footing too so if I have any really heavy equipment, I can put it here.

 Here's the corrected corner from the outside.  The short wall is the footing for the rear garage wall.

Here's the length of the wall.  Sometimes the blocks don't line up quite right because they're a standard length, which doesn't match the wall.  They use metal strapping to hold the seams together for the pour.  Any gaps will be filled with spray foam.

The offending corner is fixed and the future basement walls will be correct.  Here you can see the ICF elevator shaft that will extend from the basement to the second floor.  Also visible is the lattice system inside the wall and some of the supporting rebar.



In the end, I'm glad the mistake was recognized before the cement was poured.  If it had to be corrected afterwards, it would have cost much more time and money.

Rear walkout

Rear walkout

Rolling back a bit

After reviewing previous posts, it dawned upon me that there a TON of information that I haven't mentioned.  I'll try to recap some more so we can get to the more current information.

After reviewing our plans and exterior building materials, the HOA reluctantly accepted our house with conditions.  There was hesitation because apparently, there's a rule (I didn't find it in the HOA charter) that states that garages can not face the front of the property.  This rule is in place so that you're not looking into someone's garage and all their clutter, when the door is open.  However, the HOA ruled that we'll be able to retain our design since we're situated 250 ft. back from the road.  Indeed, you can't even see our house from the street... the street that only has, and probably will only ever have, two houses.  Unfortunately, they did deny us the use of the polyvinyl siding, so we'll have to use cement board.  Luckily, I've found a company named Nichiha that makes a great looking cedar cement board siding.  It's a little thicker than other cement boards, which produces a deeper shadow line and better grain quality.  It's probably more expensive too.

We met with the surveyor one fine summer afternoon to stake the corners of the house.  He was very helpful and allowed us to measure out a few placements and rotations, to achieve the best sitting and view.  We ended up moving the house 8 feet forward and 5 degrees counter clockwise from our original location, to get the best view of the great room.  Here's an overlay I created from an aerial shot from my quadcopter.






















As you can see, some of the larger white pines will have to come down, but at least we'll get to preserve the large oak in the back yard.  The stakes probably sat there a month while we battled (waited) the architect for the final design release.

In the meantime, we needed to finally secure our construction loan.  The process took a few months and required all banking and investment documents for the most recent 2 months.  Since it took so long, I did need submit extra documents as they became available.  In the end, the final closing on the mortgage took 20 minutes.  I guess it's easier to sign your life away than it is for them to decide they want it.

Additionally, we needed to purchase a special kind of home owners insurance.  Since there isn't technically a home to insure yet, we needed to purchase builders risk insurance.  It covers material theft, damage, and accidents.  When the build is complete, it changes to a normal home owners policy.

Some additional costs were also incurred before we could break ground.  The city required payments to be made for water and sewer permits and soil survey permits.  These probably totaled around ten thousand dollars.  That doesn't even include the actual running of these utilities to the house.  It's just a stamp on a piece of paper.

Build progress pictures are coming next....

Walls start to go up

The ICF for the basement walls were delivered and started to be assembled on 9-20-14.  A huge delivery was dropped on next to the street.  Luckily it's just foam, so transporting it back the 250 feet to the house site was pretty easy.

The footings were spiked but I didn't get to see it happen.  Here you can see about six courses of Integraspec block, each course being 12" in height.  There's a plastic channel on one side of that block that receives a plastic webbing.  This webbing acts as a spacer and holder for the horizontal rebar that gets placed every course.  There's also vertical rebar tied in, so the wall is a rebar mesh surrounded by concrete sandwiched between foam.  Pretty secure.

 This wall is the where the garage will come off of.  The wall the the left is the front of the house.

 Here you can see one of the basement walk outs.  It's flanked by two window openings and looks out onto the water.

 You can see the plastic webbing that holds the two sides of foam together.  The channel that accepts these spacers is also used as drywall "nailers"  The company logo is placed where the channels are so that when you're hanging the interior drywall, you can attach it directly to the ICF by screwing in at the logo.

 Here you can see the two basement walkouts in the back ground.  The foreground wall geometry is such because on the level above, this will be the front entrance.  You can see how they spike the footings.

Hmm. Something doesn't seem right

9-20-14.  After the walls started going up and I could really get a feel of the footprint of the house, I noticed something wasn't right.  Although the basement will not be finished when the house is completed, we've been planning how we want to utilize the space.  Quick sketches of wall placement, carving out room for storage, bathroom roughs, etc.  Standing on the elevator pad, I realized that the corners of the walls weren't lining up correctly.

 The angled corner in the center of this picture seemed off.  I called the framer (Matt) who said that the surveyors staked the corners of the house using the values from the blueprint, but he would go out the next day and measure things.  He mentioned that sometimes, blueprints don't transfer exactly to the real world, but I still felt that there was too much deviation to ignore.
  After mulling it over a bit, I took one of the aerial shots of the build and super imposed a the scaled blue print.  Sure enough, my suspicions were correct.  I emailed this picture off to the framer and he said he'll take measurements.

Matt said that he measured the wall lengths against the blueprint and everything was correct, but agreed that something was off.  A few hours later he discovered the issue.  The wall marked in white was labeled as a 22' wall on the blueprint, but if you took ruler to paper, it should measure 26'.  Some time in the revision process, the numerical measurement of that wall was not corrected and resulted in an incorrect corner stake.  Had it not been caught, this would have reduced space in the basement and first floor, resulting in a loss of a closet in the mudroom and a change of plans for the basement.  Luckily concrete wasn't poured in the walls and a fix was possible.

Pouring the foundation

We decided to make a trip to the build site on 9/16/2014 and just happened to be there on the day the footings were being poured.  It's nothing terribly exciting, but I'm surprised the ground was firm enough for the cement trucks to get back there.

 Here you can see the pad for the elevator already poured.  It's in the process of being screed level.

 The blue is the foam that will act as a form/frost control for the frost free footings.  There will also be horizontal foam buried on the exterior of the walls to help retain heat and prevent frost from getting too deep into the ground and getting to the concrete.

 The cement truck is sitting on excavated earth, so it's not hard packed down.  They just used the chute to direct where the concrete would go, and as it flowed, they would lift up the rebar sitting in the trench so that it was suspended in the concrete.

 The plywood served as a divider between the two heights of the footings; below grade and at grade.  The rebar is tied between the two elevations.

Here's how they lifted the rebar as the concrete flowed.  There's not enough weight or spring tension to the metal to press back down after the concrete has flowed under it.

After the concrete has hardened, the came back and "spiked" the footings.  That involves inserting vertical rebar where the walls of the ICF forms would be.  It ties in the footings to the concrete inside the ICF.