With the walls set, and the forms being stripped away, it was now time to finish this big piers at the end of the upper footings. Attachments had to be made into the existing wall with steel re bar but the footings actually had re bar protruding already. I set out to give Brad instructions on attaching that while I laid drains that would be under the basement.
By the time he finished up both piers most of the drain was in, and gravel put down. The drainpipe should be a filtering pipe, so that dirt and gravel chunks don't plug them up. Filtered pipe is very expensive, so I used leech lines wrapped with landscape fabric.
The short wall forms on the upper side were already set after a long week of late nights. The floor was formed and ready to pour. The piers were ready, all we needed now was one clear Saturday and we would be done with our concrete work. At 7am on May 27th the last 23 yards of concrete was delivered and the pour started. Michelle's uncle (Rick) came down to help with the floor. Hes been doing flat-work for years and he did an excellent job on the floor. It's one of the flattest and smoothest floors I have seen. I was in charge of the short walls on the upper foundation, Brad was in charge of the connecting piers. As the floor went down the walls came up. My truck emptied about half way around my walls. The floor truck emptied about halfway across the floor. The last truck was to deliver the rest of my concrete and the floor concrete. We had timed it almost perfectly so that my wall truck emptied at about the same time the last floor truck came. This was great because I didn't want a cold joint in my walls. With the last it of concrete in the truck I filled and leveled the piers that would hold the upper floor.
Now it looked like a house was starting. All we needed was the concrete to cure for a few days before we started framing. We rested for a couple of days, but rest in the shop is pretty hard to come by. It was hot, over 100 in the shop and the floor had standing water in it. The humidity was overwhelming, and since we didn't have a washing machine or drier we couldn't change our clothes through the day. We had to live with sweaty clothes until it was time for bed.
We all were in amazement at what we had accomplished. We would go out and walk up and down the walls. It seemed almost un real, just a month ago we couldn't walk anywhere near the area without being covered in mud. Now there were these giant sidewalks! We did this, with little or no help. One partial paralyzed guy and 4 kids did this. It was pretty amazing. Our favorite place to walk (because it was so wide) were those piers that connected the basement to the upper foundation.
At it's widest point this section of wall is 20 inches thick for 4 feet, tapering to a width of 8 inches on the basement side and tapering to 12 inches thick on the upper foundation which runs 36 feet. This wasn't just a typical foundation it was more of a fortress really.
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