Pete,
Have you thought about how the gravel under the garage slab will be compacted to prevent significant settling? Of particular note is the depth of the gravel at the area where the garage meets the house? I had this same issue at my house. We did not do it correctly and I may pay for it eventually.
View attachment 304785
Obed
I used 3/4 clear stone View attachment 304806and my set up was similar to that. I had about 5-6' of it dumped along house walls in the garage and just compacted it with a walk behind plate compactor. The garage floor itself had about 2-3' or so of the same stuff.View attachment 304804 The floor has been fine for 8 years.
I worked with some excavators that dug holes for 2000 Ton punch presses and had holes 25' deep. They had to fill the perimeter of those big holes around the concrete foundation that full depth and they used that same crushed stone. It was about 2' thick around and all the way up to the concrete floor. Our company engineer made them compact it every couple feet, but he said hardly anyone compacts that because it doesn't compress. I compacted my garage just to be sure, but I don't think I would have had to because it hardly settled out at all.
The nice thing about clear stone, if you decide to put a drain in later, just drill a hole in the floor and let it drain through the gravel.:cool2:
Indeed! They also put some sort of sealant on, which I thought was odd. I wasn't there all day, but this is what it looked like when I popped by after work. Yes, those are water drops from the rain/sleet/ice we had today.Will you sawcut the control joints, or were they tooled in after you took the pictures? I sure hope you went with sawcut control joints.
Good question Jim. Didn't really think about that yet. I'll ask the builder how that's done. Not that we'll be finishing the basement anytime soon, but you never know. I'm sure there's a good method for doing that with these walls. It seems they thought about everything else!Pete, in traditional construction, there's a sill plate below the wall studs that's continuous so drywall and eventually moldings can be screwed/nailed anywhere along the bottom surface. With your walls, it seems there is nothing to fasten the drywall to between studs, and moldings will have to be screwed instead of nailed (or maybe glued). Am I correct? Maybe I've missed how that is done with this system.:confused3:
Cool link! Hadn't stumbled across those guides yet. Excellent material.There is a Builders Guidline here Superior Walls® Builder Guideline Booklet - Simply Superior™
I haven't read it all yet but it does cover the overdig in an attached garage situation.
The first few pages cover most of the questions that have been brought up here.
My experence with concrete floors over the years is that cracks of some will will appear no matter what efforts are made to control them. But minor cracks are no big deal. A friend in the concrete business told me there are two things certain about concrete---first, it will dry and second, it will crack.
Your job really looks beautiful but you'll likely still get some minor cracks in the floors. Maybe someone else more knowlegable could add something to this.