[TheForge] OT: My floor is poured: the saga

[Andrew Vida]

On 9/3/14, 7:59 AM, Bob Ehrenberger wrote:
> OT: My floor is poured: the saga (Andrew Vida)
>
> Andy, did you get the walls poured? I saw the talk about forms but no 
> saga for a pour.
Not the walls.  BIG problems there.  Engineer came to examine the state 
of the piers a company caller Marco put in late last summer. They 
pooched the job BIG time.  They used push-piers which are now considered 
inferior.  Engineer said they should have used screw piles, which makes 
sense to me.  The push-piers are supposed to go in plumb all ways.  
These are bent out 6.5" in 6 feet, WAY beyond the tolerance for such 
piers.  On top of that, the walls are only 3/16.  Engineer said 1/4 is 
absolute minimum on a 3" pier.  SO now I'm in it with a lawyer and 
winter is coming and I have no idea how any of this is going to get done.

They way it was planned is that I was going to use the earth (red shale 
clay) as the outer form.  Inner forms would be about $500 to build or 
rent.  Set them up, place rebar, pour, done.  But because those idiots 
screwed the drainage, the whole front caved in - about 20 or more yards  
with more coming every tome it rains heavily, the last time being just 
after the floors were poured.  The forms to do things this way are going 
to be close to $5K, which we do not nearly have, so we are in some deep 
shit here and it was NOT my fault.  I had that clay dressed and it stood 
immutable for at least 2.5 years.  Those fops did their thing and a 
couple weeks later the cave-ins started right where they'd been 
working.  Then one night around 2AM this big whoosh and the house shook 
and in the morning there was at least 10 yards of goo in the excavated 
space.  And those bastards tried to tell me it was coincidence.  Liars.
>
> I have a friend that drives a concrete truck, he told me last week 
> that they were subing ice for part of the water to keep it from 
> getting too hot too quick. He is on a bridge pour and the foreman 
> checks the temp of the mix before accepting a load.

I should have ordered a test tube with the mix.  The mere threat of me 
having the concrete tested would have been enough to guarantee a good 
load.  I wish I'd known that Tuesday morning.