The Wall Forms Go Up

HI!

Back in business again. The erector set that's our house right now is in Stage I ....... putting up 1/2 of the forms for the walls. The subs for the forms have installed the plywood that makes up the outer walls of the forms. A form is the box that concrete gets poured into to make the wall and consists of an outer part and an inner part. These forms are placed over the footings that I told you about in an earlier post.

Not only do the subs put up walls, they put up a system of supports (2 x 4s) that hold the outer walls up while the inner walls are connected. It looks complicated, but the subs are real pros at reading the engineering drawings that the architects put together as we designed the house ........ thankfully!

The first thing that happened is that the subs couldn't reconcile a difference between the section drawing showing the main floor suspended inside the walls of the entry floor and the structural drawing that showed the main floor sitting on top of the wall. Kinda hard to explain ..... simply, the architect made a mistake. The subs pouring the walls need to know how high to make the walls. If they make the walls 9'-10" high and the floor is suspended inside the wall, then the ceiling height will be something like 8'-0" in the rooms on the entry level. If they make the walls 9'-10" high and the floor is placed on top of the wall, then the ceiling height will be 9'-10". I think it's settled .... we'll put the main floor on top of the wall and maintain the ceiling height for the entry floor.

The home looks bigger now than when it was just the dug-out for the footings. Just to give a little perspective, the tops of the boards are the bottom of the main floor / ceiling of the entry level floor. The floor slabs for the garage and the entry floor haven't been poured yet ..... after the walls get poured, the foundation drains are in, the Radon removal system is installed, and the walls are backfilled, they can be poured. The lower left of this picture is the garage, the upper right is the bedroom on the entry floor that we're going to use for the exercise room.

It looks like the wall forms will be completed Friday, and the subs will pour concrete on Monday. Hopefully the weather agrees with that plan!