[TheForge] OT: My floor is poured: the saga (Andrew Vida)

[Bob Ehrenberger]

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.

____
Andy,

I've been in a cellar dig for a while myself. I took a similar approach 
using the original clay for the outer form and 10ga. sheet metal (with 
angle iron braces) for the inner form.  The big difference was I just 
did 5' at a time, only digging during the hot part of the summer and 
only as much as I could get pored before fall.  So far I have most of 
the north wall done and about 10' of the west wall. I didn't do any 
digging this year because it was such a wet summer. The important thing 
is that I got the NW corner done last summer so I don't have to worry 
about cave-ins  burying my sump pump and turning my cellar into a pond.

-- 
Bob Ehrenberger
Shelbyville, MO