606 Carlton: Update

My documentation of the house project has been sorely lacking as of late, due mainly to the lack of charged batteries I have had in my camera. The last house-related blog post gave you the impression that the house looks like this:

This is no longer the case...

The concrete truck came two Fridays ago, for a very eventful pour. My parents were in town that weekend, and have photos of the pour on their camera, which I need to get. I could go into a great amount of detail about what happened that day, but the most important thing to note is that I experienced the terrifying occurrence of a form-break! I made a rookie mistake on my form design, despite how stiff and rigid it looks in the photo above. I will explain this another time, with a diagram. A picture is worth one thousand words, and so:

The beautiful, organic curve of the wall (in the right side of the photo) was not intended, but instead was a result of my form bending apart with the force of the concrete. Luckily, it didn't totally bust open, or I would have been in big trouble. The emotion I felt welling up inside of me when it happened was quite memorable - hearing a huge "crack, crunch, whooooosh," and looking over to see your form twisting, and stakes popping out of the ground, and concrete squeezing out the bottom - the number of gray hairs in my beard doubled that day. I intend to write a poem about it when I have time.

Anyways, more on the pour later....


I haven't yet removed all of the forms. Here's the pile of form lumber thus far, which I need to sort through with a hammer and drill, to get the screws and nails out, and then stack up properly.

Floor joists up!:

The crawl space:

I spent today putting up the subfloor sheathing, which basically means covering up the floor joists with 4'X8' sheets of OSB. Tomorrow I'm going to finish this subflooring job, and frame in the crawl space doorway (which you can see in the photo above). There will be a human entry door, and then a double-wide door for shoving materials into the space (like plywood, lumber, pipe, etc...). I can't wait to have the crawl space completed enough to start storing things there!