Walls and Holy Walls

The foundation work has continued this week. The forms were not finished last Friday, short a board or two.

Friday, July 27. Corner bit not finished

They finished the forms on Monday and poured the concrete. We were in Calgary and didn't get a chance to see the pour, but apparently, they just backed that concrete truck up again and poured it all in, needing to wheelbarrow it only to the far corner.

Monday, July 30. Poured, and waiting to set. 

Tuesday, they stripped the cribbing off, exposing the new walls...

Walls!!

...then the concrete cutters arrived to start cutting the door into the existing basement.

Horizontal cuts first 

The vertical cuts start

This was a messy operation. They cool the blade with water, so there was muddy water everywhere, including inside.

Some water inside

It was smelly. The saw made enough fumes to set off my carbon dioxide detector in the basement, whose endless beeping (at 85 dB) drove my cat nuts. It was also a loud operation -- right up to the point where the saw broke.

Stopped

So they came back Wednesday to finish making the wall holy.

Cuts finished. 4 blocks in the hands of gravity

No sooner had they finished that the framers showed to put on the floor. We were off in the woods, so came home last night to a whole lot of mess.

The outside, taken Thursday morning. Note the hole in the corner.

Apparently, they were one sheet short of enough flooring, so I have a triangular hole into my basement. Here's hoping it doesn't rain.


Wait a minute. It did rain (and hail) today. So much so that my roof leaked into the guest bedroom (it hasn't done that before).

Hail on my deck

The basement is a huge mess. They chose to keep the 4 blocks from the doorway cut inside, break them with a sledgehammer, and leave them to be carried out by hand.

Doorway, containing large block 

Pile o' debris 

More debris

The underside of my floor

But we also came home to a ton of concrete dust layering the whole house.

My dusty sunroom

They came back today to smooth the doorway edges and make it level with the floor. The building inspector also came around this morning and gave an OK to backfill. However...


The digger dudes can't backfill until Tuesday (it being a long weekend and all). The framer dudes can't frame next week at all. So our new schedule looks like we will start the interior demolition August 13th, versus an original sched of doing it today. In other words, we were two days behind sched coming into today, but will now get a further week's delay.