Footings & Walls (December 2001)
The building inspector and the engineer finally found the same page and we got permission to pour the first round of footings.
They did ask that the concrete cutter bore a hole in the rock under one corner of the house 12 inches in diameter and four feet deep in addition to the keyways you saw on the last page.
Those "rolling pins" to the left are the cores he removed.
At right the concrete crew has started filling the step.
This first pour didn't completely define the perimeter of the house. Back there where Jim and Ryan are standing, we'll need to step the footing up and over that rock ledge we hammered through with the track hoe.
Actually, it will turn out we'll completely encase that rock ledge in footing.
And that's what we've started in this picture — building a one-sided form for an enormous footing so our walls can step up onto that rock ledge.
Building one-sided forms are pretty dicey. There's a lot of weight trying to find a weak link. We drilled holes into the rock and epoxied threaded rod to the rock, then threaded the rod through the forms and bolted them in place using 2x8 whalers. And then we braced them to the footings we'd already pour. And then we hoped.
The first pour didn't get us high enough, but it seemed safer to get where we wanted to go in two stages. Above we've poured about 25 yards behind those walls and we we're starting to extend the forms up another three feet. We kept our first pour away from our keyway because we had to weave a pretty intricate web of rebar tying the footing to the retaining walls on the back side of the garage.
That's inch-and-a-quarter bar to the right, something you don't often see in residential construction.
We're finally ready to pour the second stage of this footing and below, the guys are starting to fill the lower walls, working their way back to the big footing.
These were taken Dec. 31, 2001 — a great way to end the year.
Below Rob and Ryan are screeding off the top of our gigantic footing.
Next we'll get a track hoe down inside the perimeter to do what backfill we can do by reaching over the walls we've poured. Then we'll continue our walls an around, enclosing the house, and then we can turn back into carpenters and start framing.