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A Hole in our Yard - Another Not a Cruise Live Blog


melmar02

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16 hours ago, WAAAYTOOO said:

LOL.  That seems a little bass ackwards...but what do I know ?

I agree.

 

5 hours ago, cruisellama said:

Don't forget the swim-up bar 

No swim up bar, but I have been eyeing this...

Margaritaville® Tahiti Frozen Concoction™ Maker. View a larger version of this product image.

 

4 hours ago, JLMoran said:

I wonder if they do that to help avoid problems with erosion and/or the hole collapsing around where the pipes are laid? Last thing you want is someone trying to get a segment of pipe into the bottom, right next to the wall, and all that dirt (and rocks?) suddenly collapses unexpectedly. I know how heavy the stuff here in NJ is; carrying out a 5-gallon bucket from a plant hole I've dug weighs a lot; can't imagine how much mass you'd be hit with if a 6-foot tall wall of dirt and rock suddenly collapsed onto you.

Good point. A 6 ft avalanche of dirt and rock would be no fun. 

 

No one is here today. We got a little more rain yesterday evening, so that may have delayed things. We're supposed to get more rain and maybe even some snow over the weekend. We're pretty laid back about the schedule since it's winter, but it's a lot more fun to see the work happening than to look at an empty work site.

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The plumbers showed up just before 11:30 this morning, and they were done about 4 hours later. These are just the pipes that will run through or under the gunite. They will dig the trenches and connect to the water some time later. It was cool to watch them use a heat gun to bend the pvc in places.

The crew kindly recovered all edges with plastic (even though we don't have any rain in the forecast until Sunday or Monday I think), so these aren't the best photos.

The project manager stopped by while they were working and scheduled our inspection for tomorrow. Gunite is next!

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Out of curiosity how many county inspections do you have to do? Trying to figure out for the de!ay time between each inspection.  IE we need 7 inspections by the county....survey, framing, grading-soil removal, plumbing, electrical, gunite, and fencing before we are allowed to do the water fill - can't get the water truck without the final inspection.

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6 hours ago, Pima1988 said:

Out of curiosity how many county inspections do you have to do? Trying to figure out for the de!ay time between each inspection.  IE we need 7 inspections by the county....survey, framing, grading-soil removal, plumbing, electrical, gunite, and fencing before we are allowed to do the water fill - can't get the water truck without the final inspection.

Our builder uses a website that is supposed to show the dates of all the steps. It could be a really great tool...if they actually filled in the dates. It does have all the steps listed though, and I counted 6 inspections. Belly steel, gas, p-trap, bonding loop/deck, pre-plaster, and final inspection. We asked the project manager the other day how long it takes to get an inspection scheduled, and he told us that our city is so small that they don't have an inspector - they outsource it to a 3rd party company. He said quite a few cities in the Dallas area use the same company, and it's usually just a day or two wait. He called them while he was here around 2 or 3pm yesterday and got our steel inspection set for today.

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While it was still dark this morning, I heard the plastic moving around like it was being blown around by the wind. It went on for a few minutes before I finally realized someone was out there moving it. I quickly got dressed and went outside but had missed what I assume was the project manager removing the cover for the inspection. It was about 20 minutes before the sun was up, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't the inspector anyway. Regardless, I was able to get a couple better pictures. 

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2 hours ago, WAAAYTOOO said:

Wind, critters, creepers ?

Hopefully not any creepers!

window licking GIF

Everyone and their brother can already see into our back yard, I don't need anyone peeping through the windows. 

That's actually been the one major downside to the whole project. The side where the fence is down is one of the two major streets in and out of our neighborhood, and we are in a very active walking community. Lots of families with strollers walking the dog with kiddos on bikes. I just wave at everyone who stops to look and close the blinds before it gets dark. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

After a week of being on the schedule then a week of rain delays, we have a pool full of men this morning getting ready to shoot the gunite. The crew showed up at 6:45 and started taking off the tarp around the edge of the pool and adding one on our fence. They started to put one over the opening to our patio when I got this first photo. I'm not sure I'm going to get progress photos because the second photo is my view now. We turned on our security camera, hopeful that we could glimpse at the progress, but it's a little low. It is oddly similar to watching the deck camera channel on a ship though, so we're going to leave it on. 

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Not sure if this is something you or others reading this thread will know to any great degree, but I'm genuinely curious how spraying what I assume is some form of concrete onto the rebar and (I'm guessing) plywood forms around it doesn't just flow down to the ground into a lumpy mess. Is it some kind of compound that stays liquid as long as it's not in contact with the air, but once in contact dries in a matter of minutes? Is it thicker than regular concrete, even though it's apparently sprayable through a pressure hose?

Just looking at these photos, thinking of the plumb-bob straight walls that all in-ground pools have, and trying to wrap my head around how that's down without wood molding forms that enclose both the inside and outside of the walls.

You can take the building process away from the engineer, but you can't take the engineer away from the building process? ?

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10 hours ago, JLMoran said:

Not sure if this is something you or others reading this thread will know to any great degree, but I'm genuinely curious how spraying what I assume is some form of concrete onto the rebar and (I'm guessing) plywood forms around it doesn't just flow down to the ground into a lumpy mess.

Compression...

 

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@JLMoran Our builder uses gunite which is shot through the hose as a powder. There is a second hose for water. The two are mixed as they come out of the hoses, and the guy spraying them can adjust the water and therefore thickness of what is being sprayed on the walls. To be honest, I've never mixed concrete myself, so I'm not sure if it is thinner or not. This seemed to be pretty thick, kind of like mortar that was then spread out with various tools to form the inner shape. Kind of like icing a cake with buttercream. I can do all kinds of different things with icing depending on how thick it is. 

The outside dried relatively quickly. The crew finished at 2pm, and the project manager stopped by closely thereafter and said that we could get in it that night if we avoided the edges of the steps and benches. If we waited until today we wouldn't have to worry about them though. It's a foot thick in some places so to keep the outside from forming cracks while the inside dries, we have to wet it down twice a day. When they finished, they dug 4 little holes in the bottom back down to the dirt underneath that will just be filled with plaster at the end of the project. If we get more rain and any water accumulates under the shell, this will prevent it from floating on top of the water like a boat, the holes will let that water come into the pool instead. 

In about a week they'll come out to finish the plumbing and electrical, then they install the water line tile.

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1 hour ago, twangster said:

Compression...

Thanks, @twangster! And from the suggestions at the end of the video, there was this hyperlapse showing the actual work being done (with shotcrete instead of gunite, but I imagine it's basically the same). Here it shows how those plumb-bob straight surfaces get made, thanks to lots of manual effort and skill in working with concrete and knowing the right tools and techniques to shape it.

What's amazing to me about this is the very end -- you'll see they do the walls first, floor last, and I couldn't figure out why until the end. The stuff dries to weight-bearing firmness so fast that by the time they've finished smoothing the floor, they can just hop out of there by climbing up the wall at the shallow end without leaving so much as a depression on the surface.

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18 hours ago, cruisellama said:

Plastering is pretty entertaining too.   Clopping around in boots with pegs to keep them from sinking into the fresh plaster.

 

I've watched a couple videos and thought those boots must protect the finish. They don't look very comfortable.

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Today the plumbers showed up to dig the trenches for the lines going from the main water line at the front of the house to the equipment pad to the pool. It's all been between our house and our neighbor's so far; nothing has been dug in the backyard yet.

Fortunately we can stop watering the gunite twice a day - it's been cold in the mornings. ?

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So a few interesting things have come up, and it seems we're at the "I just need a Xanax" and add-on portion of our journey. ?

The sprinkler manifold things (I'm obviously the technical one in our family) on the side of our house that we saved from a lifetime of darkness by moving the equipment pad were torn up by the ditch witch the plumbers used to dig the trench for the lines. There are bits of sad, mangled plastic up and down the side of the house. I panicked... we had just preserved them, and now it's a war zone over there. We have a few sprinkler zones listed in the contract to be repaired, but not this. I mentioned to the project manager, and he said, "Oh yeah, I knew that would happen". I asked why go to the trouble to move the equipment pad, and he said it's much easier to fix them in their original location than to re-install them from scratch in a new location, and that they would take care of it. 

When the plumbers came out yesterday to work on the water lines, they were in our front yard...far away from any place a pool water line would go...with their ditch witch. Again, I panicked because we're at the limit of the sprinkler zones in the contract. Not to mention that they are tearing up a swath of perfectly good grass across most of the front yard. Well, turns out they weren't using the cutting bit. There's this neat little attachment for the equipment that can snake its way under slabs of concrete. You know, like a driveway. Our water clean out line is in our front flower bed on one side of the drive way and the main water line is on the other. They were just getting from one side to the other and needed to back way up to get the machine going. There's a giant gouge across our front yard, but it's not as bad as when I initially saw it from an upstairs window. I didn't see any sprinkler lines had been exposed when I went out there, so it looks like we're ok. 

The pool company's electrician came out to talk about lighting and we're adding lights to the steps off the deck on the left side of the pool for safety which we knew we wanted at the start. We're going to add some lights to the underside of the coping around the spa and firepit too and want them to do it so it's covered under their warranty. I also don't want an electrician to have to pull up our stone decking to hide wires after the pool is finished. We had them go ahead and quote us some string lights across the L shape our roof makes, and it came back crazy high - almost $2000. We're already wired for lighting out there, so all they have to do is connect and string the lights. We'll take care of that after the construction is finished and put that saved money toward our Alaska cruise.

We've determined our sales guy was pretty new when we started this whole process. There have just been a couple of things that he said that stand out now that we are in the middle of the project. For instance, he told us the kitchen would be the very last thing to be constructed. The PM has told us it will happen in 2-3 weeks when the stone guys are here doing the rest of the work which makes sense. Why pay someone to come out twice when you don't have to? However, DH is now scrambling to research and pick out his grill and fridge since he thought he had more like 4-6 weeks. There are some other things the sales guy has said that just don't make sense now that we're going through the process. In hindsight, it kind of feels like he was learning along with us. ?‍♀️ 

Good news though, the PM said things start happening fast at this point. 

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1 hour ago, WAAAYTOOO said:

How exciting though.  What's a little ripped-up plastic ?  Of course, I'm laughing b/c I know that if this was happening in Daniel's yard he would be in orbit by now.  He does not handle things like "oh, I knew that would happen..." well at all.  I'm sure it will all work out.

Yeah...DH is an engineer and used to being in control of schedules and details so he's not thrilled. I probably should have made sure he took his blood pressure meds yesterday before I called screaming that they were tearing up our front yard. ?

The Big Bang Theory Reaction GIF

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In my experience, a ditch witch ALWAYS cuts something.  I replaced a deck with a paver patio some years ago.  My landscaper had to reroute my sump pump drain because it discharged under then old deck.  When he buried the new drain around the patio, he cut my neighbor's cable.  The following spring when he came back to do our sprinkler system, he cut the same neighbor's cable again.  A few years later, my sump pump was creating a flood at the side of my house.  While fishing the drain, I found found tree roots had completely blocked it.  The roots got in because, you guessed it, while installing the sprinklers, he cut right through the drain he had previously installed!

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1 hour ago, melmar02 said:

Yeah...DH is an engineer and used to being in control of schedules and details so he's not thrilled. I probably should have made sure he took his blood pressure meds yesterday before I called screaming that they were tearing up our front yard. ?

LOL.  Both of us are Engineers but I'm pretty mellow.  Not so much with Dann-o.  Plus, he's the yard guy.

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We've hit a lull due to the weather. Like most of the country, it will be wet and freezing here for a week. I think it's a blessing in disguise because DH wasn't ready to order his outdoor kitchen equipment until now, and it will take about 2 weeks to get here. The only other thing that's happened is the forms have been removed from around the gunite and all the plastic tarp that was covering the fence was taken away at that time. So it still looks like a construction site, it's just not a messy construction site now.

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Thanks for checking @JLMoran. We've been below freezing for days and had some negative temps in the mornings; however, we've also been extremely fortunate and have kept power throughout. Most our area is without or still experiencing rolling blackouts. I need to start baking for Saturday's wedding tomorrow, so hopefully our luck holds. All faucets dripping with no issues there so far either.  My sister lives 20 miles away and their power was out most of Monday. Brother in law had no power for over 30 hours and is now dealing with broken pipes. We've had 2 rounds of snow 3-4 inches the fist time and another couple inches last night. 

I guess the pool technically has water in it.  A lot of them have frozen over in our area.

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The frozen tundra of Texas has thawed out, and work has resumed. The plumbers showed up around 3:00 yesterday afternoon to finish digging the trenches for the pipes manually. They also brought some of the equipment out. The project manager stopped by this morning and said the plumbing should be finished today. We have rain in the forecast this week, so he's not sure if the electrician will make it out before next week.

DH's grill should be on the way. He received daily updates from the company about shipping delays due to the weather, but he hasn't heard a thing since it warmed up. He's going to follow up with them today. I'm going to lose my spot in the garage soon. Stonework should start by the end of next week, and our patio furniture will be taking my car's place for a bit. We may leave it there until after plaster to keep it clean.

I'm excited that things have started moving again!

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Glad to hear y'all made it through last week. I lost power for about 36 hrs, but I have a Generac generator. Put it in for hurricane season this past summer and never thought its first extended use would be for a winter storm. However, not having water for 4 days sucked! Collecting snow and ice melt in mop buckets to be able to flush the toilet sucked! ERCOT sucks!

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