More destruction before construction

The construction team met at the site for a Saturday morning conference. Fai and Neil on the right are the ones orchestrating the mayhem. David, on the left in the red jacket, is the concrete artist and the skeptical looking one, not surprisingly, is Jenn. The only guy actually looking at the plans is Alexei, our shoring engineer who, distressingly, looks a little worried about the whole thing. Fai and Neil offered to dig a basement under the 3-foot reinforced concrete slab they just poured. I was tempted for a minute, but there's been enough excavation on this project for now. I want to see structures going up, not down.




Everyone is pleased with the bunker wall and we are planning the next couple of weeks of work. Before pouring any new concrete, however, more destruction must ensue. Next to go will be the green retaining wall that has faithfully held back the hill for the last 50 years or so. Farewell, little wall, we hardly knew you.



After a bit of retaining wall mayhem, there will be more rebar, forms and concrete and a new and more robust retaining wall will be built further up the hill. The real challenge will be to build the third wall all the way up the slope, but that will be next week.

The Bunker

Very few things are as formidable as a massive wall of reinforced concrete and this one does not dissapoint. With surprising speed, the crew excavated the rest of the dirt and rock under the old patio, put up rebar and forms, and poured tons of concrete to complete the retaining wall. When we stopped by today, they had just removed the forms and the concrete was still setting and therefore radiating heat. This thing is simply massive (check out the workers on the right for scale). I don't remember asking for a bomb shelter, but I guess I have one now.





We were reminded of why we have to build on this scale today when a 3.5 Richter jolt rattled the Bay Area.  

The next step is to put in the fourth wall where the rebar is sticking out of the floor.  That will be next week.

Free at last, free at last!

"There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes". Hamlet, Act III

Despite doing their best, the Department of Building Inspection ("DBI") could only muster enough insolence to delay us from September to February and we are back on the building track with renewed vigor.

The DBI has been in the headlines lately, and the coverage has not been particularly flattering. No matter how bad it looks from the news reports, in reality, it is far, far, far worse. In our case, out of the five-month delay, about three weeks was spent actually dealing with the problem that stopped our construction in the first place. The rest of the time was spent waiting for one of the many officials involved to actually care enough to want to acknowledge our existence, try to figure out who is actually working that week, and pushing our paperwork towards one of the many civil servants who was not there, in training, on vacation, or otherwise proving unworthy of whatever tax money is being wasted on paying their salary and benefits.

To be fair, some of the officials we dealt with were conscientious, hard working and caring individuals and they did their best to move things along, but even their best efforts were blocked by one individual whose continued employment at DBI appears to have very little with merit, professionalism, or even basic truthfulness. Let's hope that new DBI director can reward the worthy, and chuck out the worthless, civil service protection notwithstanding.

But I digress; this is a happy post because on February 1, DBI finally ran out of excuses and work resumed on the dream home and here's how we know that construction is back on:



Since the time of the Pyramids, the first step in building any sort of edifice from the most humble shack to a soaring skyscraper is the same: dig a big hole. This project is no exception, and as soon as we escaped the clutches of DBI, the digging resumed and it did not take too long to convert the back patio and the space under it to a big, deep pit.

Here's the "before" picture of the back patio, note the concrete slab in the center and the brick stairs on the right



These are the "after" pictures. You can still see the bottom of the brick stairway on the right, but the concrete slab and all the rock and dirt under down to a couple of feet under the garage level has been dug out and hauled away.





Of course, there is really no point in having a deep pit if you don't fill it with something, in our case lots and lots of concrete to keep the new house rooted to the spot. First came lots of reinforcing steel bars and the wooden forms to hold the concrete while it set:





Next step, add concrete:



Then wait three days, and viola, retaining walls. The huge block of concrete in the middle of the picture is one of them. There are two others, one on each side.



What's next? Dig some more and do it again, until there is 12' tall, 16'' thick wall of steel reinforced concrete holding back the bottom of the hill and holding up the neighbors houses while enclosing my future wine cellar:





Now, in case you think the guys in the construction crew are doing all the hard work, I will have you know that Jenn and I have faced an equally daunting challenge this weekend, bathtub shopping at the bathtub super mart, Tubz:




We do what we can to contribute.