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.