Stripping Forms

The guys got started bright and early today, stripping forms from the front foundations. It's all very straightforward: they remove the bracing, then pry off the wood forms and twist free the ends of the metal straps. Lots of banging involved.

The transition formwork will have Bituthene applied to it, so it got a coating with the surface prep stuff. On the other side of the house, they actually got the membrane applied.

We're told that framing up the shear walls that connect the foundation to the house will begin Tuesday, with a tiny bit of leveling (one corner of the house and some of the former back porch that is the laundry room are saggy, but the rest is remarkably level; the side porch's houseward cant is a known issue and will be handled then, as well). Here are the posts, waiting to be installed.

I guess I didn't really expect this to move so fast. We have walls up front. Foundations on which the house will soon (VERY soon) be resting.

I've decided to use the space in the front bay as an oubliette.

In any concrete pour, you end up with big chunks of concrete that didn't squish into the formwork. So you let it cure up on the ground and then haul it away to be ground up and used as aggregate for more concrete (concrete is that way, see).

The big surprise for me today was seeing the guys start hauling in some dirt and backfilling in the trenches in the front. There's still plenty of filling to be done, but I was not expecting that. It makes it feel so much more done.

And the little curiosity of the day: the guys took down the wood they'd used to build up the engineered fill in the alley, so you can see what it looks like from the side, like an archeological dig. Only no digging allowed.

Today's offerings from Foundation Cam are a little odd. We have the view down the alley, in which forms are stripped, thrown out of the crawlspace, and Bituthene is applied to the exterior wall. Then we have the view under the house, my favourite of the two, in which forms are stripped at great and tedious length, and then backfilling happens. Enjoy!

posted by ayse on 09/02/05