Sea of Mustard
NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.
We came home today to find a new shipment of rebar lying in the driveway. Tomorrow morning I'll be meeting the structural engineer at the house to inspect and discuss the rebar layout, after which they can start tying it up. Which means that there will be rebar on the floor tomorrow.
The guys laid out the Stego Wrap today, and it kind of looks like somebody smeared yellow mustard all over the basement. The Stego Wrap, as a reminder, is a moisture barrier: it's intended to keep the bottom of the slab relatively dry.
They had formed up the area around the shoring. When the floor gets poured, there will be three large holes in it where the shoring sits. In order to make sure that the eventual plugs that go in those holes don't get shoved upward over time, a notch is designed into the walls of the holes. It's a fairly simple arrangement of boards to make the notch.
The new sump is working nicely, and the drain field is draining into it. It's quite loud, actually, all that water dripping into there. But it will be easy to tell that it's functioning.
The space is really starting to feel like a room.
The guys had set this one piece of rebar in the basement. Tomorrow there should be a sea of them.
Somebody was sketching out the layout for the rebar on this 2x4: you can see the three stacks of shoring blocks, and how thick the rebar is around them. It's really impressively over-engineered, which was exactly what we wanted. That is why we like our engineer so very much.
One thing that has been striking us lately is the difference in the amount of work Counterforce gets done in a day compared to what Contractor A (who was, after all, the one who showed up on the job site drunk) was doing. John mentioned tonight that they work solidly all day long, without stopping to yell at each other or sitting around talking. They show up at 7:30, work straight through the day, and pack it up and go home at 4. I've noticed that we have a lot more to look at and a lot more real progress at the end of each day. It's really refreshing.
The other thing I've noticed is that I don't spend as much time cleaning cigarette butts off the property. Contractor A (who also threw his trash in a pile in our yard) would smoke like mad under the house (and he might as well have been smoking in the house, given that there are lots of cracks to daylight in the floors), and like all smokers, he left butts everywhere. I've picked up dozens of them. It really drives me crazy the way smokers think it's perfectly OK to leave butts around. But Contractor A was an exceptionally filthy person, and everybody else just has to pick up after him.
posted by ayse on 08/10/05