Foundation

I never realized how many delays we could possibly have with concrete. This is just the beginning..

When we went to Lake Chelan in July 2017 for vacation, most of the site work was already complete; Eco-blocks were in place and the ground was flat. We were told that they would be starting the foundation the week we were gone, and we were really looking forward to seeing things move to the next phase when the house would begin to take shape.

When we returned from vacation, however, nothing had been done. We were then told that Lamb Concrete (the company who was hired to do this) was doing another job before ours, and stated that our job was a much bigger, and they wanted to get the smaller one out of the way first. At the time we said that we understood as it was supposed to set us back only a couple of weeks, and basically we waited for our turn. We knew that the construction industry in Kirkland was crazy busy, so we patiently waited for it to be our turn.

Turns out that the Teamsters local 174 were threatening to strike for most of the month of August and that caused quite a few delays. All of the concrete trucks in King County were driven by these union members, and whenever there was talk of striking, which seemed to be 1-2 times per week, none of the suppliers in the area were delivering concrete. This caused a huge backlog of delays, so getting concrete to any jobs took much much longer. So instead of the other job taking a couple of weeks to complete, it ended up taking a month, essentially pushing us back further.

So in mid-August they started to work on the forms that would be our footings. Was very nice to see the outlines of the house forming on the ground. I remember thinking how small the footprint of the house seemed. I knew it was a giant hole that we had dug for the house, but I couldn’t help but think how small everything seemed. It made me seriously question whether I would have enough space in the garage or workshop.

After those initial delays, things seemed to be moving along pretty smoothly. The concrete for the footings was poured at the end of August, and they began working on the foundation walls almost immediately after the concrete cured. I knew we had a huge basement wall that was going to be poured (it was over 10 ft high), but it was hard to believe how many panels they would really need to complete our house.

When the guys were about 80% done with building the form walls, the owner of the company, Bill Lamb, decided that he was going to borrow a few of the panels that were needed to complete our job, and used them for another job. I’m guessing he thought that he could build his forms and return them before they would be done with ours.

It ended up taking about 3 weeks to get the forms back on our job site after they were borrowed. The guys were able to finish that last 20% of the job in about 3 days, and then we had to wait for our turn to get concrete. Thankfully the threats to strike were finally over, but the delays they caused by the Teamsters 174 were still affecting how quickly we could get concrete.

Finally at the end of September 2017, the Super Pumper (concrete pump truck) was on our job site and poured the walls for our foundation. It felt a bit ridiculous how long it took to get to this point. It ended up being close to 3 months for something that should have easily been completed in a few weeks.

Things with concrete went relatively smoothly as far as the slab goes. The only real negative thing that I can think of is how terrible their timing was, as far as getting concrete on site. You see, typically you will pour a slab in the morning and let it cure for a few hours before you bring out the power trowel, which is like a giant fan blade with a handle that’s used to smooth the concrete. The troweling takes quite a while to get a good finish, and since they didn’t actually pour the slab till the afternoon, the guys had to work really late in the night (close to midnight). I’m thankful that they did work as late as they did, as they did a great job pouring that slab.

One thing that I’m still trying to resolve with Joe are these LED work lights that were charged to my account and then disappeared. Because the guys had to work so late, they needed work lights to illuminate the job site. In October the sun sets around 5PM, so they had to work for many hours in darkness. Joe’s assistant ended up buying 4x $150 LED work lights from Dunn Lumber, which ended up being charged to my account. That was fine and all, but these lights ended up being brought to the house Joe was building for himself for safe keeping, and they ended up disappearing. Had I known that I would end up owning these lights, I would have gone out of my way to make sure that they were taken care of. I remember seeing the lights laying there the next day, but I couldn’t imagine that I would be the one having to pay for them.

You’d think that these folks would be prepared for situations like this, without having to buy brand new work lights every time the sun set. I can imagine it’s not totally uncommon to work past 5PM in the Winter on a project.

At any rate, I’m still trying to resolve this with Joe, since I don’t think I should be responsible for paying the $600 for those lights since he lost them. It’s a lot of money and I feel like they were careless with them.. I was also not presented with invoices for almost 4 months after this so I didn’t even know that they were mine till long after they were lost.

I had planned to document more of the drama I had with concrete in this post, but it’s close to 1AM and I’m getting tired. In a later post I’ll talk more about our exploding wall and the slough of delays we had to endure in the Summer this past year.