Ground Breaking, shop build starts

[ColoRv]

If you have a decent contractor he can help you not have any plumbing. Or, bring in your own plumber to make sure the plumbing that isn't there isn't connected properly so that it won't work the way it was intended not to. That, of course, is provided you don't understand how to not flow downhill yourself in which case not running any plumbing can easily be accomplished over the weekend when the contractors are working hard on your project....from their living rooms.

[XOverZero]

Originally Posted by ColoRv

If you have a decent contractor he can help you not have any plumbing. Or, bring in your own plumber to make sure the plumbing that isn't there isn't connected properly so that it won't work the way it was intended not to. That, of course, is provided you don't understand how to not flow downhill yourself in which case not running any plumbing can easily be accomplished over the weekend when the contractors are working hard on your project....from their living rooms.

ColoRV, methinks you, Sir, are a dangerous man and a potential threat to good order and discipline. You are on the watch list. Oh, and BTW, keep up the good work.

[scard]

As the sun is going down today 9 dump trucks (12 cu.yd each?) of fill has been spread and compacted. Now we are waiting on the pier driller, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. There are 12 12" piers that are going to be drilled to 10' or until non-crumbly limestone rock shelf is found. ($35/ft extra) The structural engineer will be onsite for the initial drill. Yeah, back story; We dug three profile holes on the site with a big JD 410 backhoe. We went to 9' before finding solid rock. I was blown away. I had never seen such a deep hole in central Texas W of I35. The top 3-4' is heavy clay. The walls in our house show a foundation done wrong on this soil. Not the shop, not on my watch. (disclaimer: I work at a national civil engineering firm. read: "resources")

So, last weekend, we rented a trencher to cut the trench for the electrical conduit. There is a power pole that is on our property that has our service entry on it (left of picture). Armed with the profile hole info, the Logistics Officer picked up a 36" trencher on tracks while I was sleeping Saturday morning. We were 98% certain we knew where all wire and water was. We had put eyeballs on everything but the water from the well to the house, but knew where it was. This is in the county, well and septic.

Ok, I know if you're still reading you know what is coming...
I had only finished half of my Saturday coffee when I heard the trencher fire up in the circle drive out front. I knew I would be in trouble if I didn't come running within 30sec. And we were immediately working. I started within the building footprint. It only took 3min. to find the main water line from the well to the house with the trencher!!! Yeah, we were instantaneously filming a Laurel and Hardy episode in slow motion. I had told our neighbor the day before that it was the one thing that we had not yet put eyeballs on in the ground but "...we'll find it tomorrow for sure."

Tanya ran for the well pressure tank shutoff as we had already pre-briefed this event. I shut the trencher down and we went to lunch while our heart rate came down. Back from lunch I ran to Home Depot for quick and dirty repair supplies (one 2' length of 1-1/4" PVC and two couplers) and the water was flowing at the house in 10min. Now our change of priorities had us re-routing a water line around our building. Cut a trench this way and that way. If you know Central Texas, this is clay, dirt and ROCK, so very slow going with lots of pain.

Plenty of pain, but we're very glad that we hit the water line on a weekend as opposed to our foundation contractor or even worse, the pier driller who would have gone straight through it. Note: the piers must be poured within 8hrs of being drilled. This snafu in that process could have cost us thousands.

Sunday came and we were making noise by 7:30am. We hired a day laborer to hand dig the last few inches for the water re-route tie in locations. He was completely confused with the fact that Tanya and I were in the trench digging on the other side (all day, 9hrs). We also got to work on our original objective of cutting the trench for the 200A service 100'. Noon Sunday I started laying in the new water service pipe and tied in both ends. We were not without water for more than 30min across the whole weekend. Bam!!

Yes, we got the 100' electrical trench cut with great pain. In fact, TC is out there right now as the sun is going down and I'm writing this working on cleaning it out in prep for this weekend's plan to set some sand, place some conduit, and cover about 85' of it.

What does this have to do with anything? I don't know about you, but this has been an RV dream of mine for a long time. The first RV was built in our first small tract house. Then we made more money and got a little older and started the second RV. It now waits for the next step of THIS.

[Ron B.]

You say you have rocks. Ha, if you had rocky soil you would not have access to a trencher. No such thing here as we have boulders that would not fit in the tandem truck. Last summer I was loading up one of these to get them off of a friend's property. I was using my crane as my twenty two ton excavator could barely move them and as I began lowering the rock into the truck box the chain touch one side and made it slip. What a bang and chains swinging. I think that was when I cracked my windshield in the crane. These rocks also make a good noise when we dump them out.
So lets just say when we run an underground line, it might not be in a straight line around here. Good luck with your hangar build. I built my 60'X60' hangar probably 15 years ago just out in my back yard (grass strip) and love it. I doubt I would be still flying and building if I had not done this as I'm not one to drive a 1/2 hr. to go flying. Maybe if I was retired I would, but many times I come home and only decide to go flying after I have supper.

[rzbill]

Congratulations on the new project. Enjoy yourselves.

All of our abodes have been integrated into hillsides which gave the opportunity for the shop to simply be the basement with garage door exits.

Diane pokes fun at me with visitors by telling them that I put a drawing of a completed RV7A in the basement construction plans (which I did )

[bret]

YIKES! I did the dame thing with a trencher while living in Ramona, that main had 160 PSI and almost broke the meter connection at the street. but I was just installing a sprinkler system, not as cool as a shop ;-)

[Bill Boyd]

Originally Posted by rzbill

Congratulations on the new project. Enjoy yourselves.

All of our abodes have been integrated into hillsides which gave the opportunity for the shop to simply be the basement with garage door exits.

Diane pokes fun at me with visitors by telling them that I put a drawing of a completed RV7A in the basement construction plans (which I did )

I tried paper-doll cutouts, to scale, of the RV-10 on top of my new home basement blueprints before telling the engineer which support columns he was going to have to eliminate and span with miracle-trusses, or whatever he called them. Glad I did. I have room to put the wings on that beast and turn it 360 in the shop.

[DanH]

Originally Posted by scard

Ok, I know if you're still reading you know what is coming...
I had only finished half of my Saturday coffee when I heard the trencher fire up in the circle drive out front.

Cookie, armed with a trencher and a determined look....now there's a mental picture.

She was just dying to run that thing, wasn't she?

[scard]

It was another rough and tumble week on the "RV Construction" project. Tuesday was pier drilling day. Tanya met the foundation guy on site at about 7am while I came to grips with getting out of bed. I was 15-20min behind with a cup of coffee and one eye open. From 150' away, through that one eye, as I shuffled toward the action, I could see that Tanya and the contractor were doing some "field engineering" on the pad. The best analysis I could muster was "bummer, we haven't even gotten started and something has already come off the rails." They were laying out the piers for the drillers and one of the spacing dimensions didn't jive on the structural engineer's plans. No problem, Tanya had already made the final executive decision on the dimension by the time I arrived to the brief.

The pier drilling company had two rigs on site at 7:30am and got to work in a friendly competition to see who could drill more holes (the final score was 9 to 5). That was a very interesting process and I watched every minute of the 2.5hrs that it took them to drill the 14 holes while Tanya went to work. All piers were about 10' deep and drilled at least 1' into a solid rock shelf. Our structural engineer arrived about mid way through drilling to inspect the holes and ensure that we were in the rock layer that we expected. He was very happy to throw a 16' piece of 1" rebar into a few holes and have it almost bounce back out. He asked the foundation guy how we got two rigs. "It just happened ." The key here is to get concrete in these piers ASAP after they are drilled. We moved up the concrete order three hours.


And there was concrete for the piers. That pour took about an hour and the next day and a half was spent setting up perimeter forms.


Then it is time to dig grade beams. The mini excevator made decent progress. If you aren't familiar with concrete pier and beam foundations, it is very similar to wood pier and beam. Except with... concrete. This is opposed to a "floating foundation".


At the end of the week the grade beams were done as well as "final" grade elevations. That sets the thickness of our foundation. The funky trench in the forground is our "homework" for the weekend. To finish all of the electrical conduit into the east wall. This is our primary 200A service entry. So where Exactly is that wall?


So, Friday evening Tanya and I started laying out string lines for this critical wall to place our conduit. In this picture, Tanya is standing in front of an 8' wide full length porch of large cedar posts and beams. Uh, Houston, the wall isn't on top of the grade-beam or pier. It is off by at least 2". TC made an immediate call to the foundation guy that his presence was requested either tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. Time was now ticking on us being able to finish our weekend work.


The foundation guy showed up 8am and we gave him a proper beat down. The piers were drilled perfectly 2" too far from the "datum". I told the foundation guy the words that the structural engineer would say if asked about this. The distance from what we're now calling the datum is a critical distance as it is our truss span. Luckily we have not yet released the latest truss design to manufacturing, but must within the next few days. So the simple solution is to move the wall 2". Everybody is onboard with that solution and I get 6.6sqft more shop space! Woohoo! With the wall string lines moved everything looks much better and Tanya and I got to work on conduit.


"Final grade?" yeah, I don't think so. We spent an hour making a grading map and marking high spots/areas. They'll have guys with shovels out tomorrow to make it right but Tanya just couldn't stand it so she picked up a shovel and fixed 65% of the high spots while I headed for the A/C. I told her she was crazy and that we had hired people to do that part while I departed the scene of the crime.
From the pi cam collecting time lapse.


It was a good week. Steel on Tuesday, final forms on Wednesday, and the big event on Thursday for the final pour. The concrete will be flown over the trees in the last pic with a huge pump truck. Should be exciting. Yeah, I'm burning some well deserved time off work for this paid entertainment.

P.S. Finally they left the keys in the bobcat this weekend! Guess who unnecessarily moved a big pile of dirt Saturday evening . "Let's see, turtle - rabbit, of course i've got this. Just like the riding lawn mower ." Tanya watched as I played tonka truck in the sand box.

[tcard]

The 'to-remain-nameless' company will be here tomorrow to mentally picture non-plumbing runs. I'm sure Scott will be waiting for them with their 7am arrival.