Foundation - First Pour

A few more days have passed. To the casual observer, little may be seen different. But stuff has happened.
Changes include:
1) The concrete for the first foundation pour for both buildings has been poured and the forms removed.
2) The underground conduit to contain the low voltage wire (telephone, network, gate controls, etc) is complete from the pump house to the barn.
3) The water line is in the ground from the pump house, past the barn hose bib, the future takeoff for the barn, and part of the way to the office.

Here is a photo after the pour on the barn foundation but before the forms were removed:There were of course issues getting to this point. Some of the earthquake straps (metal plates that are supposed to be partially buried in the concrete, and come up and attach to the outside of the framing) were placed in the wrong position. You can see one in the front left corner of the photo above.

In one case, this would limit the possible width of the barn doors on the barn end wall to an unacceptable size. In another, it would reduce the size of "shear walls". Shear walls are sections of wall that are attached to the foundation with the straps to prevent the building shearing (falling over) under high stress loads like hurricanes and earthquakes.

The foundation guy claims all these will be fixed before the second pour. There are also some straps missing and nearly all are only roughly in the correct place, but don't cause any problems.

The other foundation issue was that they laid the rebar too high in the office foundation to connect the first pour to the second pour. The result would be that the floor would have to be 6" higher than planned, reducing the sidewall from 9' to 8' 6".

This would not be disastrous, but would require extra concrete and remove the requirement of a internal step down from outside grade level. We have told them that we would prefer this would be fixed. But if re bending the 1/2" rebar was too difficult, we could cope. They say it will be fixed. We'll see, it seems rather difficult to do to me.

The office floor is supposed to be 1' below the garage floor and 6" below the outside grade at the entry door. This was to require a concrete step be poured at the door area.

You can see the errant rebar in the photo below. They come up out of the foundation first pour and bend into the building 6" higher than they are supposed to. The second pour will complete the side wall and form the slab floor of the office. It attaches to the first pour with the rebar. Next up will be filling the center of the foundation with dirt and compacting to support the weight of the concrete slab floor.

A week behind when I originally was told the foundation forms would be started, the foundation forms are now going in. They put in a full day yesterday and got this far on the barn:And this far on the office:
They are out there now on the second day of forms. I think that means they will be ready to pour Monday.

The foundation will have to be done in two stages because of the height. First, there is a 2x2 base, then an angled rise to a slab with a retaining wall. In between the two pours will be a a bunch of dirt movement.

The excitement for the day, however, is another mis communication with the general contractor, this time regarding who was responsible for putting in the electrical conduit. This PVC piping is supposed to be put in the ground between two buildings so that future wires may be pulled to connect the buildings.

This was finally resolved with me purchasing the conduit, outside the contract, and them putting it in for no additional charge.

There was also some fun yesterday as the forms were already going in and no one had talked to me yet about the height of the foundation. This is important because it controls how all your landscaping and driveways work. It is always an issue because you don't know how deep the foundation has to be placed until you excavate the dirt and see where bearing soil is. Too low, and you have to have a lot more forms and concrete to get the top to the desired level. And, they never build enough height into the bid price to keep the bid low.

It turns out in this case, it would cost a lot more for the barn foundation wall to exceed 3', so we are stuck with this height. It is already going to cost more just to get to 3'. The end result of this is that there will be more slope in the driveway up to the barn than I would like. But we will have to cope with some creative landscaping.

In the office, there was additional height required too, but we were also able to save some by getting rid of one of the space-wasting steps into the sunken office. We are going to be able to do this because we are going to forfeit placement of a door to the garage until we have passed inspection.

Tomorrow morning, the foundation crew arrives to start setting forms. So this is our last chance to get rid of some problematic trees leaning over the construction areas. So the past couple days I have been removing them. A couple were a bit tricky hanging in such a way that they could have fallen on the existing garage. But I finally got them all down. All that is left is to cart away the pieces, probably tonight after it cools down a bit.

Here is a shot of the downed tree, a fairly large cottonwood, which now lays in the office construction footprint.

Additional progress is the digging of the trench which will hold power, water, and communications cables from the pump house, where the power meter is located, to the barn footprint. Here are two shots, the first from the barn side, the second from the pump house. Its about a 250' trench, 2-4' deep. The first also shows another downed tree that had to be removed.

One bit of excitement, while digging near the pump house, the water line from the water well head to the pump house was damaged. That happened yesterday. They fixed it this morning. Here is a shot of the exposed repaired water pipe.

One nice thing about all this digging, it will allow me to finally be able to finish installing a conduit pipe from the automated gates to the pump house providing permanent power to the gates. Until now, this was done with a low voltage line running 400' on the ground from the pump house to the gate controller.

It is the morning of work Day 5 and not much as changed since my last post, not worth a new picture. They have put corner stakes in to indicate where the foundation will go. Other than that, basically no change.
I did indicate 2 trees (Cottenwoods) to them that really need to go before the forms are put in or else they will be difficult to get out later. I believe they marked them. I don't know if they will be removing them or not. I would do them myself but time is short and I am not sure I can drop them without hitting the existing garage.
Unfortunately my work schedule has been heating up and I have not had a lot of time to stay involved in the project.

It is the morning of Day 3. I got home late last night and couldn't take a decent picture. Yesterday's progress was to complete excavation for the barn and mostly finish excavation for the office addition.

Here is the barn footprint:Doesn't look much different than yesterday. The edges are cleaned up a bit.

I talked with the contractor and he is convinced it is deep enough so we are going with it. From a building height perspective, it is a little low. I am hoping that we can build up a bit so the driveway is more level with the garage driveway. But if it costs more, I will probably not force the issue.

Here is the first shot of the office excavation:

It seems much deeper here, closer to the foundation wall of the garage, which makes sense.

I see I am going to have to do some forestry around this site this weekend as there are a couple trees that are way too close will be more difficult to cut them later. I think I will start with just getting rid of two Cottonwoods as they are the most likely to topple and look at the Firs a little latter when there is a better perspective. They are just off the right side of the photo.

I haven't talked much about the office. It will be a 20' x 25' addition with vaulted 9' ceilings and a step or two down from the garage through a connecting door and a door to the outside.

This will be Toni's studio/office/work room and the barn will be mine plus storage. She runs an interior design business and has a lot of catalogs and samples. Currently, they stifle the house living space. This will be a chance for her to separate her personal and business lives.

The contractor just arrived for Day 3's work as I wrote this. Let's see what we get done today.

Groundbreaking

This is the start of my first blog. The subject is my historic barn project. I will document the construction of a breathtakingly beautiful (if you like barns as I do) turn-of the-century style barn.

Today was the groundbreaking. In retrospect, I should have started this back in December when we started design and were looking for a general contractor. Perhaps many of the best stories have already occurred. We'll see. I suspect something interesting will happen.

The exterior of the barn is designed to fit in with the many wonderful barns in the Carnation, Washington area. The inside will be host to my rather modern woodworking shop.

It is relatively small (28' x 40') and relatively tall (30'). It is very secure (to protect my tools) and very efficient (to protect my wallet). Here is the basic design:
Along with the barn, a second construction project will also be completed simultaneously. This project will add about 500 sf of office space to our existing garage for our businesses. And, it will add a covered area for our tractor and implements. So you will also see photos and comments from that project from time to time.

But, as I mentioned, today was groundbreaking. And so here is a photo of the results of the first day's construction.
The conclusion today by us is that there is some concern as to if the dirt has been removed deep enough to reach "bearing" soil. This is the term given to the icky gray clay-like soil that is relatively free from organic matter and relatively uncompress able. You have to dig to this layer to put your foundation on, or the foundation may crack and move with the water table and decaying matter. When we build our house, very close to this spot, it was much deeper. So this will be the question for the contractor tomorrow AM when construction resumes.