4230 Raleigh Street Construction Update – Foundations are Complete
Monday, 19 January 2009 by Dave
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve updated the blog regarding our construction progress. The combination of a two week delay as we waited for Xcel Energy to hook up power to the site and some adverse weather conditions put a damper on visible progress. We are now well on our way and figured we would get everyone caught up on progress to date.
With the foundation walls cured and backfilled it’s time to get the drain lines under the slab in place.
As the trenching for the basement bath drain lines got underway it became obvious that we were going to need to get power to the sump pump sooner rather than later. While the soil borings didn’t indicate that the water table would be an issue at our basement slab depth we were the path of least resistance for all of the melting snow and surrounding groundwater. Thankfully it was just cold enough to keep things from becoming too messy as work progressed.
Deciding we couldn’t wait on Xcel for another week to get our temporary power hooked up on site, we rented a generator to run the sump pump while the workers finished up.
Our concrete contractor was pretty much wide open schedule-wise and came out early to get the garage slab formed up, reinforced, and poured.
Below are the finished drain lines for the basmeent bathroom. It was impressive how well the perimter drain and sump pump worked at drying out the basement. We decided it was better safe than sorry on the potential for future slab moisture issues and made the decision to import some granular fill to encourage draining below the finished slab.
In the shot below you can see the imported sand/gravel mix that was brought in for drainage purposes below the rebar being set in place.
The crew puts the final few bars into place prior to the conrcrete arriving.
The garage slab is now adequately cured and ready for framing.
And we finally have concrete! The rebar is pulled up by hand allowing the concrete to spread beneath it. The crew spreads the concrete around and will begin finishing the surface shortly.
From here we’ll start to see some real progress. Even though we were delayed a bit it certainly is nice to be able to complete foundations in the middle of winter.
