New garage time!

[dragoneggs]

Somebody stocked up on some LED shoplights! :thumbsup:

 

[aczlan]

My block guy is 3k a week, and that's 20 yards of concrete. $500 for block that he can lay in 2 days vs a day and a half of building forms and probably 4k in concrete, for a strength difference that will likely never come into play. The footer concrete is 18" in front and 24-30" in the back and 24" wide with lots of rebar. And it's sitting on hard clay and huge rocks. Maybe if the soil wasn't so hard I'd want something beefier, but I don't think this is going to move.

Our building is much larger (150ish by 300ish), they have had 3 guys setting forms and they are pouring the walls in 3 sections.
They have been at it for just under 2 weeks so far. They should be done with the walls (about 6' above the footer) and footer by Friday.

Aaron Z

 

[fatjay]

Somebody stocked up on some LED shoplights! :thumbsup:

17.99 at Costco, and I’m going to need lots of them.

 

[chim]

17.99 at Costco, and I’m going to need lots of them.

Costco had some motion-detecting 4 footers on sale a while back and I bought two. They have adjustments for sensitivity, off delay, etc. There's one in each bay of the garage plugged into the outlet for the door openers. They throw enough light that the regular lights are rarely used. If they have them on sale again I'd grab a few more for other spots.

 

[dragoneggs]

17.99 at Costco, and I’m going to need lots of them.

Yeah I got 12 of them in my 24x28 garage shop. Love them! On five zones, on/off with a remote controller. They definitely light up the space and all on one circuit plus other ancillary devices.

 

[fatjay]

Got 4 corners built in 8 hours. Learning surveying pretty well and getting a lot of practice. We needed to pivot the building for clearances. Needed to move one side up 1.5", another side back 1.5". I didn't think pivoting was important so I didn't say anything.

I have a 2nd generation 40 year experience contractor guiding me as I build, I'm posing as the main contractor and he is the support. He's basically teaching me as I go.

So I didn't speak up, and he didn't notice. We got 4 corners in and measured square. When I told him we were off by 5.5" the grin left his face and said "5.5" is tear down, limit's 3". We took a few min to see if we could use various methods to get back to square, but ultimately decided to do it right. Kept one corner and shot everyone off of that. 1.5" left on the front's, 1.5" forward on the right rear.

So that's tomorrow. And I'll need to shoot level as well, again. We're off by 1-2" in every corner and the right rear corner, which has the drain, is the high corner. Go figure.

Note to self, if i know it's going to happen, run it by the pro to make sure it's ok. I'm making all the measurements, I'm good at math and geometry, we lost a half of a day because of me. And I paid for it.

 

[dragoneggs]

Pivot 1.5in for clearances? Set backs? What?

 

[fatjay]

The footer isn't perfectly square, it's a bit of a parallelogram. Which means the sides are parallel but the corners aren't an exact 90 degree angle. So when it came to laying the back row of block, it was a bit tight. The block was to close to the edge of the footer. The footer is 2' wide and hte block is 1' wide, but supposed to be centered over the footer as much as possible. Over the span of 44', it's easy to lose a couple inches, so to compensate I pivoted the right wall back 1.5" and the left wall forward 1.5". What I meant to do was pivot the entire building while keeping square. But as I am new at this, I didn't realize how important it was to keep square.

 

[chim]

You are wise to make things as near perfect as you can from the beginning. While I'm not an expert builder by any stretch, I've had leaning experiences that illustrated the importance of keeping things plumb and square. Later on you won't have to be ripping plywood from 48" on one end to 45" on the other or cutting a sheet of metal roof on a bias.

 

[747driver]

Where are your 'batter boards' ? You should have batter boards in place marking all 4 corners. Then you use those to set your string lines for square and level. I have had to tear a few corners down myself !!! You done right tearing it down and starting over......