Friday, August 18, 2006

We are foundationally challenged

The foundation wall is now up! Unfortunately everything has gone wrong so far with the foundation. Let's recap...
  • The concrete guys drove into our front yard, dropped concrete in the front yard, broke one of our garden pavers to hold their plastic down, and one of the workers stole the plans stamped by the City (the contractor had to go get another set stamped)
  • Failed first inspection - the reinforcement bars weren't drilled into the existing foundation and wood stakes were used (which wasn't allowed per the drawings)
  • Failed second inspection - one of the reinforcement bars was the wrong size (plus when the guy came to fix the first inspection mistakes, he had to borrow paint and a drill from Sam)
  • They poured the concrete over one of the bars that was supposed to be upright for reinforcement (fortunately Sam was able to pull it back up before the concrete completely dried)
  • The upright reinforcement bars were not lined up, so they couldn't build the wall around them per the drawings. They had to take down one whole row of the foundation wall, cut the bars, re-insert the bars in the right place and rebuild the foundation wall.
  • They also had originally not left vents or space for a horizontal reinforcement bar that were both required per the drawings.
  • Also the original foundation wall was too high, so they had to start over to make it lower (now it is 2-1/2 concrete pices instead of 3 high).
  • Now that the foundation wall is up, it is still too high so they are brainstorming ideas to make it work (so we don't have to step UP to get into our new den).

Hopefully the rest of the process will go better!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And you had to pay them for all those mistakes...