Snows are melting & Trails are clearing up: Carpenter's Peak Hike

HI!

Such a nice day yesterday - about 65 degrees and little wind, so Deb and I decided to tackle one of the hikes that we were going to do last October, but weather kept us from doing. Carpenter's Peak is a spot where there's nearly a 360 degree overlook of the foothills and the Roxborough State Park, Chatfield State Park, and Denver areas.

The trail starts in Roxborough State Park, and we went to the end of the road in Roxborough Park, walked down a gravel road a half mile or so, and accessed the trail. It's pretty muddy this time of year ..... it snowed a couple of days ago and then got warm, so the snow is melting and the water is running down the trail. So, mud puddles and wet made for slippery footing on the switchbacks that are at the beginning of the trail. 

The view from the top is spectacular. To the West are the snow capped Fourteeners; to the South the chain of foothills and Douglas Open Space; below us, the homes of Roxborough Park and in the distance to the North, the chain of reservoirs culminating in Chatfield Reservoir. At 7,610 feet and a round trip of 6+ miles, the hike took us around three hours to complete. What a great day's adventure!

Finishing the Backfilling, Starting the Plumbing

HI!

Since last we connected, the walls have solidified, the freeze-protecting insulation has been installed and some of the final grading is complete.

And ..... happily, Deb has returned from her adventure on the West coast. She's back at it, busily helping Steve the Builder and, today, the Plumber. Thanks Deb and welcome back!

They are talking about the next few weeks ..... when the Radon gas removal system is in, the under slab plumbing is installed, and the floor slabs are all poured and cured.

There's a lot of the major plumbing installed under the floor slab of the main floor. Here, the ditches are being dug ...... oooops! caught the workers leaning on instead of using their shovels.

We made our first in-construction change today. If you see in back of the young man with the blue ball cap, there's a sort of shelf in the wall behind him. It's there in order to support the Great Room above, but it's being treated by the architectural firm as a crawl space. According to the architectural firm, it'll have a heavy plastic barrier laid on the ground and that "window" area would be framed in and covered over with wall board. We suggested that a slab could be poured instead of putting in plastic, and we could use the area as a storage ..... we'd put nice matching doors on the space so we could close it off. Nice, cheap addition to the storage areas of the house!

There's actually another "crawl space" in the workroom. It's a little smaller, but between the two crawl spaces, we've added about 200 square feet of storage area.

The work of backfilling is in its last days. The excavator is taking the dirt from the piles around the yard and bucket-by-bucket filling in the volume between the outside of the wall and the inside of the original excavation - about 3 feet. The smaller machine in the foreground has a "sheep's foot" on the end of the boom. The sheep's foot is placed on the loose dirt and hydraulically vibrated under the full weight of the machine. That compacts the soil layer by layer until the dirt is compacted level with the top of the forms. Hopefully, the stockpiled dirt around the yard is gone and the compacted soil is level with the top of the forms at the same time so that no more dirt has to be trucked off site (very expensive!).

Cheers!!

It's Almost Recognizable as a Home

HI!

An update as we move through the foundation stage of building. The previous post showed the forms and the pouring of the walls on Monday of this week. Pouring the walls was completed in one day, the concrete set over night and the forms were "stripped" on Tuesday. Stripping involves removing the boards and supports that were so carefully installed week before last.

Stripping off the wood forms makes a world of difference in being able to visualize the house.

Here's the most recent shot of the garage area. The concrete walls are stepped from the right to the left and around the corner to match the final countours of the lot in that are. There's no need to pour higher walls, as they will all be made of lumber (framed) and above the ground.

You can just make out that the outside of all of the poured walls looks like they have been painted a battleship gray color. That's the waterproofing for the walls that will be in contact with the backfill (dirt).

Today, subs are installing the foundation drains. All around the outside, at the base of the foundation, they dig a trench and lay an 8" flexible hose in it. The hose has holes in it, and any water that percolates down along the foundation will be collected in these pipes and moved to the front of the yard to be dumped into a drainage ditch.

In the next week or so, we can expect to have the foundation drains completed, the frost wall insulation installed and inspected, and the backfill completed.

The excavators will be back in after that to start on connection of the water and sewer laterals (from the mains in the street to the home) and the in-ground plumbing that will wind up under the slabs of the entry level floors.

Here are other pictures of the main entry level rooms:

To the left of the two blocks in the center of the room (piers for the spiral stairway) lies the mechanical room. It's behind and under the stairway, and plays the important roles of being the kitties' living space and backlighting the glass bottle wall!

To the right of the mechanical room and the stairway there's two bedrooms and a bath. The bedroom in front, with a view out of the front of the house, is the exercise room - Deb's Pilates machine, elliptical trainer, weights, etc.

Outside of the East wall (the bedrooms are along the East wall) is the foundation for a retaining wall. The distance between our house and the property line is 10 feet, so there's not much room for forming a drainage ditch, so we had to create a way for the water to move to the ditch in front of the yard. The water will cascade over the wall should there be enough flow.

The foundation for the North wall of the Great Room juts out. The top of the wall is "Level 100.00" - the level of the Main Floor and the North Courtyard.

It's really hard to get a line of sight, but it looks like the view down the valley to Chatfield Lake and to Denver beyond will be great from the courtyard. Yeah!

Maybe you caught the fact that the outside corners of the home are "rounded." Traditional adobe construction ends up having rounded outside corners on their homes. Deb asked the architects to figure out how to make ours look like the original, and they came up with making the foundation corners 45 degree angles and filling out the angle with wood framing in a semi-circle with stucco over them. Thanks Deb!!

Cheers!!

Pouring the Walls

HI!

The forms are done and the walls are ready for concrete. Steve the Builder brought in a concrete pump ..... interesting piece of equipment. Looks like a Praying Mantis. It's parked in the driveway and the boom can reach all the way back the rear of the house. There's a flexible hose on the end of the boom where the concrete eventually comes out. A concrete truck backs up to a trough at the rear of the concrete pumper, dumps his mix into the hopper, and the pump moves the concrete through the piping / boom to the point where someone guides the concrete into the forms.

There's an Operator with the concrete pump, and he's outside the cab near where the concrete goes into the forms. Around his waist is a remote control unit like one might see in a model airplane park. This guy is good ..... he doesn't even bother to look at his control box; he watches the guy guiding the end of the pipe and the concrete going into the form, adjusting the boom as the guy on the forms walks.

Here's the guy who works the hose. The last three feet or so of the piping system is flexible and he guides the end near the form and the concrete pours in ..... As the form fills up, he walks along, standing one foot on each of the forms. That's perfectly OK and fairly easy to do, except the forms are not the same height all the way around. If he falls off of this form, he's OK. But, if he falls off the ones at the back of the home, he's in trouble. The forms there are close to 14 feet high!

The other jobs that go along with pouring the concrete include "The Settler." He's the guy on the ground, near the bottom of the form, who hits the side of the forms about 200 times a minute to settle the concrete - making sure there aren't any gaps or air pockets. Gotta get all the corners sharp!

In the other hand, the guy has a small bladed shovel that he uses to smooth out the top of the concrete.


I watched the process for two cement truck loads and they filled about 40 feet of the lower set of forms; when I left, there were three more cement trucks waiting to take their turn! I'm guessing ...... maybe 20 trucks? Who knows. Maybe I'll have to ask how many yards when I pay the bill for this part of the job, LOL!