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!

The Wall Forms Seem to Be Complete

HI!

The deer think that the wall forms are complete and ready to pour! Photo is courtesy of our next door neighbors, Kenneth and Susan (Thanks!). There's some worry that the deer will fall into the excavation and not be able to get out ...... but, that hasn't happened yet.

As of late Friday afternoon, the forms for the walls are complete, I think. There's still a question in my mind about the "rounded corners" that Deb wants, but I'll email Steve the Builder later on today to understand how that's going to be done.

The home looks like a pick-up stix game from when I was a kid! There are 2 x 4 supports for the walls sticking up everywhere. The second set of forms completes the space where the walls will be formed.

My assumption is that they'll pour the concrete on Monday next. It'll probably take 3 days or so for the walls to harden to the point where the forms can be stripped. I'm sure that the subs will strip the forms as soon as possible, since they need the forms for other jobs they are doing right now.

Next steps are to install the foundation drains and backfill, install the Radon removal system and then prepare for pouring the floor slabs.

Cheers!!

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!

How it's going at the Biggest Loser Resort

This is the beginning of my 5th week of 6 at the resort. The picture you see at the left was actually taken after the 1st week.  If the trainer that I'm standing with looks familiar, it's because he was one of the contestants on the Biggest Loser -- season 12.  His name is Ramon Medeiros.  I had just finished a ARC trainer workout;  it is like an elliptical but is so great for weary joints!  Phil scoped out some at the local 24 Hour Fitness, so I am happy, happy, happy!  Ramon is frequently asked questions by people who want to know what happens on the Biggest Loser show…and how the contestants lose so much weight each week.  He says, while we (folks at the resort) work out 6 hours a day -- they would work out 12 hours a day.  They cook their own meals, have only two sessions a week with a trainer, and potential contestants go through a battery of psych tests designed to make sure that they could endure the "game". One thing that they did have an abundance of was an entourage of health professionals making sure they were ok.  They really had some personal accountability to get the results that they got.  I had respect for the contestants before, but now I'm even more impressed with their hard work.  

This resort stuff is hard enough, but we have wonderful meals prepared that we don't even have to worry about. It makes eating right so easy. All I have to do is wash my 3-4 sets of workout clothes each day and get myself to the classes and the meals on time!

Here's a picture of me and Renee -- another person celebrating turning 60 by wanting to get healthier.  This was taken just last week.   She and I progressed from Van 2 (one step up from the bottom) to Van 6 (one step away from the top) for the hikes.  We both felt pretty good about that.   She went home to Hawaii -- tough life she has!

At the 4 week mark, I lost 15.5 lbs of fat, gained 4.5 lbs of lean muscle for a net loss of 11 lbs; about 3 lbs per week. It is not as much as I had hoped to lose, but then again I had unrealistic expectations based on what I saw on the show. My body has changed dramatically though. I feel like I've stepped back in time ten years. I feel so much stronger and I have the confidence that I can continue to build my strength and trim my body based on what I've learned here. I won't be exercising as much as I do here, so one take away is that I won't see the scale move very quickly. I will likely only weigh myself once / month and if I have only lost a few pounds -- I will be a happy camper.