Victory

Alas, happy campers, this week we start to see substantive progress at La Casa! Los Amigos showed up early Monday morning at 7:00am and started pouring the foundation footings and slab. By noon, when I arrived, they had about 80% of the concrete poured and formed. I was told that the plan for this foundation is roughly 9 trucks carrying 10.5 cubic yards each. By contrast, our last home in San Marcos required 26 trucks with the same load capacity, but then this house doesn't need eight foot foundation walls, and is half the size. All in all, still a lot of pour. This is the view of the mountains and the 13th hole on the Victory course. I'm hoping that I won't hit my house with a golf ball from one of my crazy non-straight drives. From what I could tell, this appeared to be the last truck filling in what will be one of the guest rooms. Nothing but the best for our family and friends - a floor! I was going to buy these guys a pizza lunch, but apparently they work straight thro

This week we are finally seeing some movement after a series of plumbing and forming inspections. It seems like this is going to be a constant activity each week. Here is where we left you last week: In somewhat of a surprise, after missing a few days because of family friends visiting us, and a short trip to scenic Sedona, we returned to find that most of the post-tensioning wiring and rebar had been installed while we were gone. BTW, if you've never had an opportunity to visit Sedona, it is a 'must do' on your bucket list. Incredible environmental landscape and some decent wine, to boot! A "gotta do" trip! In this picture, the red cable is the post-tensioning wire which will be tightened to a specific load level once the concrete is poured as a foundation slab. The outside footers, which aren't clearly visible, are about 12" deep, so this foundation won't be going anywhere soon. We were generally impressed with how straight and precise the cabling i

This week moved along at a slow pace although there were some critical milestones hurdled in the process. Most of the visual progress was the entire backfilling (is that a word?) of the trenches for plumbing and electrical conduits, and a forced settling of the earth with compacting tools. Today they'll flood the site with water to force additional settling before next week's progress. Most importantly, the site passed three inspections this week by the city and county, so now we can move forward without any (known) issues to the post-tensioning aspects of the slab development. These piles are from the backfill of the trenches, and for the base of the foundation slab to come. The stuff looks like crushed lava rock, but is actually a brown rock found in the local mountains similar to crushed granite found in Texas.  Compacting is pretty straightforward. Run a skid steer blade (small heavy tractor) over the sight until everything is level. Add water. Temporary framing to outline

At the end of Week 4, the inspectors arrived and blessed the plumbing and electrical underground setup, which allowed for the troughs to be backfilled. We've also had some subsequent rain, so the ground ended up be firmly compacted; good for helping to eliminate cracks in shifting concrete slabs. So now, we're basically back to where we started from with the exception of black pipe and conduit sticking out of the same ground. As we advance into the week, the plumbers will start to connect the above-ground piping in preparation for the laying of high tensile strength guide wires for the concrete foundation. We've chosen to do slab-on-grade with post-tensioning.  The  principle  behind  post-tensioned concrete  is that compressive stresses induced by high-strength steel tendons in a  concrete  member before loads are applied will balance the tensile stresses imposed in the member during service. So much for the technical explanation. Simply put, in layman's terms, post-te