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Concrete Foundation Stem Wall Complete



Whew! We did it!!! HUGE THANKS to all our friends that continue to volunteer to help us with this crazy project. We got stuck doing this foundation ourselves and without the help from them we couldn't have done it. You guys ROCK and we super appreciate your willingness to slave away! We also attribute our success to using the Spider Tie forming system. It really made all the difference for us. I admit I had my doubts that we could pull it off AND get it done before winter. The rebar delays didn't help my confidence. Now there is a little voice in my head that keeps whispering "its only good if we did it correctly" but I will continue to suppress it since we won't know until they come to build the dome.
There isn't time to celebrate yet. We have a bunch of stuff to finish up before winter halts our progress. The days are getting shorter and colder and we are feeling the pressure to get it done. We are pretty safe weather wise until the end of October but after that we are risking a lot. Wet November weather will mean mud and frozen dirt. Both conditions make back filling the foundation impossible.

Things didn't go as smoothly as they seem. The night before we were stressing out. We went to dinner at a friends house and found out we hired the wrong size crane pump truck. When the company asked how far the crane needed to reach I assumed that since it was on wheels it could move. Seems reasonable to me. I picked 50ft figuring it could move around. Yeah....turns out... not so much. They have huge outriggers they need to put down to stabilize.
They look a bit like big spider legs. The trucks don't move unless they have to for a big job. We don't qualify as a big job. OOPS! My bad! Chock it up to knowing nothing and as usual if you don't ask the right question, information isn't volunteered. It doesn't matter that there is no way to ask a question you didn't know about. This problem seems to be common for us so far. Long story short, they answered the phone at 8 pm on a Sunday night and clearly decided we didn't know what we needed and they overcompensated. Not that I am complaining....but it was GIGANTIC and more than a little comical. The photos don't do this thing justice. Just try to compare the tiny people to it.
Then there is the part of this where we didn't think to compensate for loss of concrete in the crane. Totally didn't even occur to me that it would be a thing. We very much annoyed the concrete dispatch by adding a few more yards of concrete to our order 30 min before they were due to show up with the first truck. He had already loaded our trucks. Double oops! In the end we still managed to pull it off and had maybe a yard of extra concrete left over but the whole time we were pouring I was worried we would run out!

I didn't get all that many photos but we had enough observers that I was able to get photos from them. I did upload two short videos.

  1. CLICK HERE to watch a time lapse from our security camera
  2. CLICK HERE to watch a short video of the crane and us finishing up






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