Last of The Grade beams

The time has come to pour the last of the footings and get out of the ground. We left off in the last post with a minefield of pipe piles sticking out of the ground. I eventually got those cut off and pipe caps put on. There was also a whole day of contouring the soil around the pile piles to match the dimensions of the grade beams. Since the soil is impossible to dig with a shovel I had to use a demo hammer (pint size jackhammer) to pick away at it. This set the stage for the concrete crew to come back and setup forms for the grade beams and walls that hold up the garage.

As with the other grade beams these have lots of steel in them. The forms went in pretty quickly and then the lots of tying of rebar. The result will be one large, stepped, piece of concrete with a 6″ concrete wall on top.

All in all the pour went quickly and without a hitch. The area is much smaller then the rest of the pours so we didn’t have to drag the hose around too far. Since the hose is filled with concrete it makes a big difference!

The forms were stripped a couple of days later and the forms for the 6″ walls on top of the grade beams were installed. The picture above shows the “uprights” sticking out of the beam that are embedded in the walls. We made quick work of the wall pour and stripped those forms a couple of days later. Because the end of the grading season was upon us I harassed Randall, the excavator, and got him over to place soil around the newly poured foundation. The arm on his trackhoe didn’t reach all the way out to the end of the footings so there was a bunch of hand work to move soil down to the areas that he couldn’t reach. Luckily it was down!

This leaves us with just one more concrete pour before the house can be built. Next time we’ll go through the basement slab (floor).

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