4721 W 30th Avenue Construction Update – Foundation is in and Waterproofed

It’s been a bit behind in keeping up with construction over at 4721 W 30th Avenue on the blog  but we’re still making progress. The foundation is in and we’re starting to backfill. Slabs for the house and garage will be coming next and then the framing will begin… that’s when the house seems to really start taking shape.

Here’s a shot of the foundation walls in place from the front of the home. You can see the waterproofing has been applied and we’re ready for back fill.

 Utility line excavation is underway for our new water and sewer lines. With the home sitting on the high side of thestreet both lines run to the front of the home rather than to the alley as you’ll see on most north-south streets in Denver.

 The water meter will be housed inside this existing pit. We had to get the top of the pit leveled to Denver Water’s standards. We’ll be able to run our new water service pretty cleanly from the pit to the home but it gets messy going from the pit to the main… we have to tear up the street for that part.

 Here is a close up shot of the perimeter drain installation. The plastic is in place to keep the soil that will be placed above the drain from clogging the system. You can see the copper line that will be used for the new water service adjacent to the foundation wall.

 A view into the basement.

 The recent rains have started the void form decomposition process. Void form is the cardboard you can see along the majority of the foundation walls below. Basically it is designed to support the wet weight of the concrete while the walls are being poured. It is typically wrapped in plastic while the concrete is wet and then the plastic is removed to allow the cardboard to break down once the concrete has set up.  The whole process creates a floating foundation wall system that allows soils to expand without applying upward pressure on the basement walls. The blocks of continuous concrete are connected to the drilled piers below. Basically thehouse is on stilts with the stilts being the drilled piers. Our piers extend about 25 feet below the bottom of the wall.

 Here is a shot of the Simpson hold downs that are cast into the foundation walls. These straps are nailed to the wood framing above and create anchor points for the home to transfer lateral (wind and or seismic) forces down through the foundation. Locally our wind loads almost always exceed the potential seismic loads in terms of design.

Next we’ll be prepping the basement for the slab pour. We need to get the drain lines for the bathroom in place and then we should be moving right along. Framing shouldn’t be too far off at this point.