Up, out, and back!

The house is growing all over all at once. From the front of the house, it is a bit difficult to miss the brand new third floor, where only air, and often fog, lived before. Of course, the entire third floor is not there yet, just the framing for the deck and the front windows, but it's still very exciting.

And here is what it looks like from inside the house:

OK, I admit it's not much right now, but it is still very exciting to see it start and to grow.

At the same time the vertical growth spurt was in progress, the house also grew back towards the back yard. This the framing for the new part of the house on the first floor that defines the new part of the house that will extend to the rear patio. This particular wall with form one wall of the kitchen and the back of the family room.



In the meantime, the back yard, also known as the concrete ocean, also advanced from a deep muddy pit, to a deep muddy pit with lots of rebar and wooden forms to hold concrete in place long enough to turn into two massive walls.



Believe or not, just last week, this edifice of rebar and wood forms was nothing but a hand-dug pit near the top of the hill:




With any luck, and some good weather, we will soon have the massive concrete walls holding this hill back for the next 100 years.

Even the grotto got into the action this week. A temporary wooden wall transformed it into a storage enclosure, perfect to store all the dirt being excavated off the hill and waiting for shipment to a hole in need of filling, somewhere nearby.



I am still waiting for the steel beams to show up. Without the steel, the house is like boneless chicken: a tasty treat, but structurally unsound. They are also very massive and very, very cool (the steel beams, not the boneless chickens).

All Busy on All Fronts

Stopped by on Saturday to check out the progress and it is pretty clear that the crew has not been spending a whole lot of quality time in the Port-a-Potty. A scant month and a half ago, this is what the back of the house looked like:



Here's where we are today:



And here is what has been done just in the last six days:



That would be a pretty good week's worth of building, but not for this crew. At the same time the house has been growing up and out, the crew has also been digging a deep, wide trench near the top of the hill, using nothing but picks and shovels, for the base of wall 3. Here's where the walls are supposed to go:



And here's what six days of hand digging looks like:





I think I need to start stopping by more often.

Next week: Steel, the Third floor, and even more concrete.

Framed!

The concrete work has been put on pause for a couple of weeks while the engineers figure out exactly how big to make the retaining walls, and let me tell you something: the walls are not getting smaller. I just hope that that the World Bank does not figure out where all of its dam building concrete went until after the stuff sets and they can't take it back because I am convinced we could have built a small hydroelectric project across a good-sized stream with all the concrete and steel we are using just to keep the dirt in place.

In the meantime, the medium of choice is plywood and the framing has started to go up. While I am a big fan of concrete, for pure instant gratification, nothing beats framing because it is fast and it actually makes the object of the construction look like a house. As usual, the guys lost no time framing up the front of the house and the parts of the first and second floor that actually exist.



And as always, lest the readers think that we shirk heavy work, Jenn is seen here engaged in heavy concentration, deciding where to put her desk, and



where to put the large screen TV.



As I said before, we do our share of the hard work. Next steps, one more floor up.

Wall 2 Wall II

With their usual alacrity, the team poured the base of Wall 2 on Friday. By the time we got there on Sunday, the concrete had already set. Here's what it looked like before and after (Click on the photo below to see the slide show):



I just hope those guys got out of the way in time -- looks like they did.




The last piece of the Grotto side walls were also poured along the way, completing all three sides of the Grotto.




Also, there was a big load of lumber that had been delivered to the house and was waiting around to be turned into framing.




Somewhere along the way, the old garage door rolled up to the big lumber yard in the sky. It was unceremoniously replaced by a couple of sheets of plywood.



We are not particularly sentimental here.

Wall 2 Wall

The Grotto Wall, or Wall 1 as the engineers call it, is pretty well done and is already working to hold the hill back -- but that was the easy part. The second retaining wall, Wall 2 to our engineers (who are, we hope, much more skilled in coming up with a sturdy design than a clever name) is wider, taller and just to make things interesting, built 9 feet up in the air.

Here's the side plan of the house and the retaining walls. Wall 1 is pretty big, but not much of challenge since it is build on level ground.



Since this is way too easy for this crew, they now have to build a bigger wall, halfway up a steep hill, without causing the hill or the houses on either side collapse on them. Here's what that looks like in the plans:



If you take a peek at the dimensions of Wall 2, you will find that from bottom to tip, it is 14 feet tall. The base (or footing) is 8 feet wide by 2 feet deep, and the whole thing stretches 25 feet across the entire width of the property. This is not a easy wall to build anywhere, particularly up the side of a hill.

And here's what that looks like in real life. Wall 1 is the huge structure below, and up on that ledge that was just excavated, the footing for wall 2 will be poured today.



Here's a closer look at the footing, with all the rebar in place and waiting to receive a huge load of concrete.



What's odd about all of this is that this is the same hill that has been held in place with modest concrete wall and a few bricks for the last 60 years.



Why do we need this miniature version of Hoover Dam in our backyard? Did the laws of physics change recently? Is global warming causing a parallel increase in gravity and a decrease of angles of repose world wide? Or have we just been lucky all this time and our luck was bound to run out sooner or later?

We can think about this while the crew builds Wall 3, even higher up the hill, and to really make it a challenge, without using any heavy machinery.

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.

Busted!

I should have known! All was progressing too well and too efficiently, and of course, an OSHA inspector, who happened to be in the neighborhood looking at an entirely different project, decided to take an interest in our little project and with a stroke of a pen, shut us down.

It seems that OSHA took a dim view of what they consider an open pit mine being dug in the backyard of the little house. So the project is now in excavation prison until further notice.

Fortunately, these guys appear to be pretty reasonable and I certainly have no desire to see anyone hurt on this job site (who needs a haunted house, even if it is lightly haunted by the spirit of an ankle sprain) but let's face it, we are not exactly digging a tunnel to Tokyo here either, so we hope that between our excavating contractor and the ever-vigilant and safety minded OSHA inspector, we can make sure all is safe and start digging safely once more.

The other big dig

And the digging goes on. More and more mud and rock are dug up from the back yard to make way for the excavator.



I think the concrete retaining wall is looking a bit nervous, probably because it knows what's going to happen next.



And once the digger has dug, this little guy moves the dirt out of the way.



Pretty impressive operation, really.