We had movers all day on Saturday emptying our old house so we ran by our lot Sunday to check to see what things were looking like.
I still have access to the inspection website so I knew that we didn't inspect on Friday so I was curious to see what the delay was.
The beams were all dug, the poly was down and the cables were in - it just needed the form float installed. The float is basically 2x4, 2x6 or 2x8s that are placed to change the elevation of the concrete.
If you have brick on your house you have a little ledge around your foundation that it sits on - that is created by float. You would also see it wherever you have interior details - the tire stops in the garage, where the the drop shower pans are, at the step down from the house to the porch/patio, etc. (You can probably see some of this if you look really closely in the next picture)
The residential industry right now is in a bit of fluctuation - there has been an unexpected surge in home starts in the first half of 2012, particularly in Houston, and as a result there is a shortage of skilled trades as well as delivery drivers. When things got slow over the last 3-4 years there was a sort of self cleansing/weed out of trades and many have moved into other industries....particularly the oil fields.
The other thing we're seeing are manufacturers (like lumber and brick) resisting the need to bring all their plants and production lines back up to full throttle. They don't know if this surge is real or if it will die out so they don't want to sink tremendous capital into re-hiring and training if they don't have to. Everyone is still undecided and no one wants to commit.
As a result, our scheduling lead times have gone out two to three times in some specific areas over the last 4-5 months. Getting concrete redi-mix deliveries is one of those areas.
All it takes is one guy not showing up or not getting his job finished in time for the next guy and it can completely wreck a schedule. That's a fairly big contributor to high blood pressure and inappropriate word usage among construction managers. So the slab pour was pushed to from Monday (because it didn't go through inspection on Friday) all the way to today.
It's the nature of the beast and you just have to roll with it as best you can. Especially because this isn't the only house that is being built out there. Balance has to be maintained across the entire work load - you can't spend 90% of your time on 10% of your job load.
Jennifer graciously took Benjamin and Rebekah by this morning so Benjamin could watch the concrete trucks and the pump truck pour OUR slab - but unfortunately the pour that was scheduled before ours was out in Conroe and was delayed so our slab didn't pour until several hours later than expected.
And you wonder why construction managers always seemed stressed out and pacing while on their phones? He's got 10-15 of these going all at once....and that's just the construction side of the job. The sticks and bricks, as I always catch myself refering to the construction side as, are the easy (and fun) stuff - the homeowner side is an entirely different beast.
I happened to make it out after work just as the last 20 yards were being pumped in. I didn't check to see what the final concrete amount was - but now I'm kind of curious. I would guess with the driveway, sidewalks, and the slab took between 140-150 yards of concrete. That's roughly $10,000 worth of concrete.
Now that the slab is poured our next big milestone is framing.
The frame pack is currently scheduled to deliver on Tuesday so what needs to happen between now and then is that the forms will need to be stripped off the slab (that's all the wood you see), the exterior clean/trash guy comes by and picks up the trash and then we get a couple loads of dirt dropped off and the tractor/skid steer comes by and grades out the lot.
Once the frame drops and the framers jump on it, we'll see a lot of big visible progress really quickly so that should get Jennifer excited. If nothing else, it'll make for good pictures for you.
I expect that it'll be dried in by the 9th or 10th of August (that's the frame, windows, house wrap, and roof).
"And awaaaaaay we go....."
No comments:
Post a Comment