Yesterday morning I got up and started to lay out the electrical boxes in the shop. I started nailing some of the boxes into the studs and pretty quickly there were a couple of small wasps buzzing around my head. I got to looking around and realized that there was a hornets nest on the bottom of the top plate of the ground floor. The nest was the size of a softball. So it wasn't huge, but it was decent size. It was clearly new because all the hornets were small in size. But when I got within a few yards, they started buzzing at me. They were clearly aggressive in nature. So I got some hornet/wasp killer spray, the kind that shoots a foam stream for 30+ feet. Wben I read the directions it said that I should not spray it at a hornets nest until night. The can said that hornets like this are highly aggressive and even if I think I have killed all the hornets, I should spray the entire can - and only do it at night or early in the morning before the hornets are active.
I determined to do it that night. So I told Dennis about the nest and said that he shouldn't work near that side of the garage that day - there was plenty to do elsewhere. I talked to Dennis at about lunch and he said that even though he was working on the second floor about 25 feet away, the hornets kept buzzing him. I guess the nail gun was still making their nest vibrate. And Dennis works on a 10/12 pitch roof (about 39.2 degrees - that is VERY steep for a roof). So Dennis took a shovel in one hand and the spray can in another and smashed the nest while spraying the nest down. I told him he was crazy, but he said that they didn't bother him again after that.
I guess hornets and wasps love construction sites because they make their paper nests out of the fine sawdust that is everywhere.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Concrete
After the excavation, the concrete company poured the footings. They essentially just poured the footings in the hole that was dug. It needed to be a minimum of 30 inches below ground to be below the frost line. Otherwise when the ground freezes during the winter, it would heave the building to and fro. The footings were a minimum of 18 inches wide and 12 inches thick.
A few days after the footings were poured, they formed the foundation wall and then poured the foundation wall. The wall was about 24 inches high so it would be about 6 inches above the ground.
After the foundation wall we had to prepare the ground for the slab. The slab only needs to be 4 inches thick and I don't want to pay for more concrete, so I ordered a bunch of gravel for structural fill to bring it up to grade. My first order of gravel I ordered 5 yards. I must have underestimated by quite a bit, so a couple days later I ordered 6 more yards (the delivery truck holds a maximum of 6 yards). Something was wrong, though, because we got more than twice the amount of gravel on the second order than the first. I told them that, but they insisted they gave me the proper amounts. Oh well. It would be nearly impossible (and highly inconvenient) to prove for about $80-$100. So I dropped it.
In the woodshop portion of the addition I am putting in-floor radiant heat. That meant that it had to be ready for the slab pour. So I ordered several 4'x8' panels of "blueboard." That is 2" thick styrofoam panels meant for insulation. I couldn't believe how sturdy those boards are. I could easily walk on it without it tearing or denting. The foam is to ensure that the heat from the radiant tubes doesn't go into the ground, but instead is directed up toward the room. On top of the blueboard we put some wire mesh (about 10 guage - too thick for wire snippers to cut). We then tied the radiant tubes back and forth all over the wire mesh. The wire mesh is really just meant to hold the tubes in place during the concrete pour. Because the tubes are filled with air, they could float to the surface if not tied down. Then we raised the wire mesh off of the blueboard with some cut pieces of brick. We really want the radiant tubes suspended in the middle of the slab, not the bottom.
The radiant tubing ends in a manifold that was encased in a wooden box in the concrete. None of the copper of the manifold is supposed to touch the concrete because the concrete would corrode the copper. Later I need to hook up the manifold to a pump in the house and an extra hot water heater. Because this is an outside application, I will need to have an anti-freeze solution in the tubing and hot water heater. Some radiant systems just use the hot water from the existing hot water heater, but that doesn't work for outside applications.
As a side note, at work we recently met with someone who built a very nice home on a hill overlooking Salt Lake Valley. The builder has not finished the home. Three weeks ago he promised us that he would have it done in two weeks. (He has been promising this for months, I guess.) The last major thing he has to do is his driveway, and he is putting in radiant heat in the driveway so he doesn't have to shovel the steep 150 foot driveway. He started telling me the costs of putting radiant heat in the driveway. He said it would cost a minimum of $50,000. Good thing I had just priced this out. In fact it would only cost about $15,000, even if you had a pro install it. If he did it himself, it would cost about half that. It was nice to be able to call him out. Unfortunately, the bank will probably own that nice radiant-heat system.
Well the concrete worked out pretty well. We actually has started framing prior to the slab pour, but once the slab was in, it was much easier to work there.
A few days after the footings were poured, they formed the foundation wall and then poured the foundation wall. The wall was about 24 inches high so it would be about 6 inches above the ground.
After the foundation wall we had to prepare the ground for the slab. The slab only needs to be 4 inches thick and I don't want to pay for more concrete, so I ordered a bunch of gravel for structural fill to bring it up to grade. My first order of gravel I ordered 5 yards. I must have underestimated by quite a bit, so a couple days later I ordered 6 more yards (the delivery truck holds a maximum of 6 yards). Something was wrong, though, because we got more than twice the amount of gravel on the second order than the first. I told them that, but they insisted they gave me the proper amounts. Oh well. It would be nearly impossible (and highly inconvenient) to prove for about $80-$100. So I dropped it.
In the woodshop portion of the addition I am putting in-floor radiant heat. That meant that it had to be ready for the slab pour. So I ordered several 4'x8' panels of "blueboard." That is 2" thick styrofoam panels meant for insulation. I couldn't believe how sturdy those boards are. I could easily walk on it without it tearing or denting. The foam is to ensure that the heat from the radiant tubes doesn't go into the ground, but instead is directed up toward the room. On top of the blueboard we put some wire mesh (about 10 guage - too thick for wire snippers to cut). We then tied the radiant tubes back and forth all over the wire mesh. The wire mesh is really just meant to hold the tubes in place during the concrete pour. Because the tubes are filled with air, they could float to the surface if not tied down. Then we raised the wire mesh off of the blueboard with some cut pieces of brick. We really want the radiant tubes suspended in the middle of the slab, not the bottom.
The radiant tubing ends in a manifold that was encased in a wooden box in the concrete. None of the copper of the manifold is supposed to touch the concrete because the concrete would corrode the copper. Later I need to hook up the manifold to a pump in the house and an extra hot water heater. Because this is an outside application, I will need to have an anti-freeze solution in the tubing and hot water heater. Some radiant systems just use the hot water from the existing hot water heater, but that doesn't work for outside applications.
As a side note, at work we recently met with someone who built a very nice home on a hill overlooking Salt Lake Valley. The builder has not finished the home. Three weeks ago he promised us that he would have it done in two weeks. (He has been promising this for months, I guess.) The last major thing he has to do is his driveway, and he is putting in radiant heat in the driveway so he doesn't have to shovel the steep 150 foot driveway. He started telling me the costs of putting radiant heat in the driveway. He said it would cost a minimum of $50,000. Good thing I had just priced this out. In fact it would only cost about $15,000, even if you had a pro install it. If he did it himself, it would cost about half that. It was nice to be able to call him out. Unfortunately, the bank will probably own that nice radiant-heat system.
Well the concrete worked out pretty well. We actually has started framing prior to the slab pour, but once the slab was in, it was much easier to work there.
This was taken about a week ago - about 6/16/08. We have finished the right dormer and sheathed both. There are two identical dormers on the back side and we have finished the one behind the right side.The right side of the garage is actually my woodshop and will have radiant heat. I put the radiant tubes down before they poured the slab of concrete. The left side will be a place to park my car. Finally inside....
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Garage-June 22, 2008
Dad suggested that I put the progress of my garage on a blog. So here's my attempt.
Dennis Blackburn has been working much more on the garage than me. So most of the credit goes to him. Framing is about 85% complete. The structure has taken its form - you can see what it will look like when it is finished, just without the stucco, siding, roof or doors/windows. We still need to finish framing one dormer, the east side wall in the attic space and finish sheathing. We should have it complete by Wednesday. Then framing will be done! Amazing.
I started the project on April 24. That's when we cut down some trees and dug for the footings and foundation wall and scraped the topsoil. Essentially we made a mess. I rented a Case 580 backhoe excavator and hired one of Dennis' friends, Jason Frandsen, to operate the machine. Jason's father owns an excavation company and Jason was trained to use one. He was extremely skilled. I had thought of doing the excavation myself, but I'm glad I didn't. Those machines are VERY powerful. I probably would have knocked down our chimney, punched a hole in the wall to our family room, or done some other incredibly stupid thing. I actually couldn't believe that a special license isn't needed to run one of those machines. Anyone can go rent one and do all sorts of damage.
During excavation we had to be careful not to hit the utility lines going into our home. Blue Stakes marked the power line, phone line and cable line. We dug by hand to hit those lines. (Actually we didn't hit the power line; it ended up being deeper than our footing depth, but more on that later.) So once we located those lines, we knew where they were and knew what to do.
However, when Jason was scraping the grass and topsoil (about 5 inches down), he hit a line with the backhoe and pulled about 7-10 feet of a conduit out of the soil. I was FREAKED. I had no idea what it was and some of those lines can be very expensive to replace. The good thing is that it was about 5 feet from the nearest painted line that marks the utilities, so if I damaged anything, it wasn't my fault.
I checked all the services to my house and everything was working fine. But I called Blue Stakes and told them what happened. They put out an alert to the companies. Within a few minutes I got a call from Provo City Power. They were concerned that I hit a power line. When I described what happened and what the conduit looked like, he said that was my fiber optic line from iProvo. That's what I thought was most likely since the phone, cable and power lines were marked. But I knew that our TV, phone and internet were connected through a fiber optic line.
What didn't make sense is that the fiber optic line is supposed to be at least 24 inches below the surface, but we hit it at around 5-7 inches. When I explained that to the Provo City Power rep, he didn't act surprised at all. In fact he said that the installers that iProvo hired totally screwed up. They didn't put the line deep enough and they didn't put a tracer in the conduit so that the line can be marked when people want to dig. I had read that iProvo was a problem, and this was one of the costliest. Many people doing anykind of digging - from sprinklers to additions to landscaping - hit these lines because they are shallow and unmarked. Each time a line is broken, it costs the City of Provo lots of money (I've heard figures ranging from $15,000 to $30,000) to fix the problem.
Anyway, we just held the line down with some rocks. and eventually buried the line through the foundation wall and under the new garage slab. Service is fine.
Speaking about rocks.... We have the rockiest soil in the world. Go down a few inches anywhere in our yard, and you will hit a rock. Our area is called the riverbottoms for a reason. They're Provo Potatoes. Without an excavation machine, we would still be digging the foundation. The machine paid them no heed.
I tried posting a video here to show the pre-construction site. But there was a problem with the upload. I'll try again later. My digital camera broke and only took video when we started excavation.
Dennis Blackburn has been working much more on the garage than me. So most of the credit goes to him. Framing is about 85% complete. The structure has taken its form - you can see what it will look like when it is finished, just without the stucco, siding, roof or doors/windows. We still need to finish framing one dormer, the east side wall in the attic space and finish sheathing. We should have it complete by Wednesday. Then framing will be done! Amazing.
I started the project on April 24. That's when we cut down some trees and dug for the footings and foundation wall and scraped the topsoil. Essentially we made a mess. I rented a Case 580 backhoe excavator and hired one of Dennis' friends, Jason Frandsen, to operate the machine. Jason's father owns an excavation company and Jason was trained to use one. He was extremely skilled. I had thought of doing the excavation myself, but I'm glad I didn't. Those machines are VERY powerful. I probably would have knocked down our chimney, punched a hole in the wall to our family room, or done some other incredibly stupid thing. I actually couldn't believe that a special license isn't needed to run one of those machines. Anyone can go rent one and do all sorts of damage.
During excavation we had to be careful not to hit the utility lines going into our home. Blue Stakes marked the power line, phone line and cable line. We dug by hand to hit those lines. (Actually we didn't hit the power line; it ended up being deeper than our footing depth, but more on that later.) So once we located those lines, we knew where they were and knew what to do.
However, when Jason was scraping the grass and topsoil (about 5 inches down), he hit a line with the backhoe and pulled about 7-10 feet of a conduit out of the soil. I was FREAKED. I had no idea what it was and some of those lines can be very expensive to replace. The good thing is that it was about 5 feet from the nearest painted line that marks the utilities, so if I damaged anything, it wasn't my fault.
I checked all the services to my house and everything was working fine. But I called Blue Stakes and told them what happened. They put out an alert to the companies. Within a few minutes I got a call from Provo City Power. They were concerned that I hit a power line. When I described what happened and what the conduit looked like, he said that was my fiber optic line from iProvo. That's what I thought was most likely since the phone, cable and power lines were marked. But I knew that our TV, phone and internet were connected through a fiber optic line.
What didn't make sense is that the fiber optic line is supposed to be at least 24 inches below the surface, but we hit it at around 5-7 inches. When I explained that to the Provo City Power rep, he didn't act surprised at all. In fact he said that the installers that iProvo hired totally screwed up. They didn't put the line deep enough and they didn't put a tracer in the conduit so that the line can be marked when people want to dig. I had read that iProvo was a problem, and this was one of the costliest. Many people doing anykind of digging - from sprinklers to additions to landscaping - hit these lines because they are shallow and unmarked. Each time a line is broken, it costs the City of Provo lots of money (I've heard figures ranging from $15,000 to $30,000) to fix the problem.
Anyway, we just held the line down with some rocks. and eventually buried the line through the foundation wall and under the new garage slab. Service is fine.
Speaking about rocks.... We have the rockiest soil in the world. Go down a few inches anywhere in our yard, and you will hit a rock. Our area is called the riverbottoms for a reason. They're Provo Potatoes. Without an excavation machine, we would still be digging the foundation. The machine paid them no heed.
I tried posting a video here to show the pre-construction site. But there was a problem with the upload. I'll try again later. My digital camera broke and only took video when we started excavation.
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