The contractor ordered 5 cement trucks to come one after another starting at 9AM. He figured he’d be out of there by 11. I came by at 9AM and the boom truck was there but no cement truck, so everyone was just waiting. When I came back at 11:15, the second truck was just leaving and […]
The most important thing that happened on Wednesday was that the Building Inspector and the Grading Inspector, who arrived at the same time, approved the work done so far. This means that the cement truck can come on Friday. Thursday will be a quiet day.
The workers were at the building site late today, trying to get all the steel for the foundation finished so that it can be inspected tomorrow. Assuming this passes, they will pour the concrete on Thursday or Friday. One task was to put rebar cages and posts in smaller holes for what will be concrete […]
We went over to the property this morning to meet the electrician and the plumber with the contractor. We spent a lot of time worrying about where to put the entrance for the electrical service (and the meter), but the length of the wires from the solar panels dictated the back of the house. The wire […]
I arrived at the property about 7:30 AM to see a big pile of I-beams in the front yard. A very long transport truck had just dropped off a machine, which is not a crane, but can function as one for what was needed here. It could lift the rebar cages and also the rebar cages […]
Today they finished drilling the last holes for what our contractor and engineer call caissons. This word choice seems odd because, according to my dictionary, a caisson is “a large watertight chamber, open at the bottom from which the water is kept out by air pressure and in which construction work may be carried out […]
Although Ted has a flower bed in one of the raised beds in the front yard, and we have native plants that flower in fairly unshowy ways in the terrace beds adjoining the staircase up to our house pad (37 steps), we also have geraniums lining the staircase, vetch covering most of the orchard by […]
The big machine arrived this morning. You could hear it chugging up the canyon for quite a while. It was preceded by 2 flagmen walking backwards in front of it. It did not have an easy time of it, having only dug out two of the deep caisson holes, but they started with the hardest […]
Well, I have finally put in an alarm on my phone to remind me to write the blog. Last Thursday they started putting more rebar into the house foundation wall. Then on Friday, they added even more. They’re taken from different angles, unfortunately. On Friday, they also started adding rebar to the garage foundation. A […]
Well, I haven’t been writing because nothing was going on, but because what they were trying to do wasn’t working very well. They started trying to drill the caissons last week with the backhoe with an auger, and it just couldn’t handle the big rocks it ran into. The contractor has found someone else with […]