Yesterday we put in the last of the caissons! Once again the cement truck showed up about an hour and a half late, but we where able to get everything done anyway. I am going to try something new and use lightbox for the images. Just click one of the thumbnails to see the slideshow and captions.
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Our friend Dudley drew up a shadow line detail for us to try save some money by not using the Fry Reglet reveal.
Basically you put a 2×4 down while you hang the dry wall then pull it out paint the framing black and put in a standard L-corner bead. Also, Steve pointed out this really cool company which makes cans for CCFC and LED lights. Something we really should look into. The company is called Axiom and their products look pretty cool.
Well it is officially 2008 and has been for about 48 hours now. To start off the year we got some good news. First, we received a new bid for our fancy septic system that was $12k less than our original bid. That is pretty nice! Like all things that LA County is making us do, this septic system is totally over the top. It is created by a company called MicroSepTec.
The MicroSepTec EnviroServer ES (yep that is right EnviroServer!)
It is a five chamber system that basically puts out extremely clean water with no particulates greater than 1/16″ in size, and the thing can be remotely monitored! The second piece of news is that we might have found a way to build a detail that we really wanted. The architects had spec’d a shadow line reveal using a product from Fry Reglet called a Z-reveal. Sean said we could save about $6k from removing this detail so we pulled it. However, talking to our friend Dudley, he mentioned another option that wouldn’t require anything other than a standard L-bracket corner molding and some black paint. I have the drawing at home and will post ASAP. I hope this will work or that some similar option will because I think it is a really cool detail. Based Dudley’s drawings and google it seems there should be plenty of options to do shadow reveals.
As for the progress on the house, well, it has been slow. We had a number of days we had to wait due to rain and then the holidays came. Now that they are over we have a nice storm coming our way!
The storm is supposed to hit Thursday night, we are hoping to be able to start pouring concrete on Tuesday. Right now our drillers are back on site and clearing out the remaining three caisson holes. They are going to drill a few feet extra in case we get mud forming at the bottom of the holes. The biggest change from my last posting is that we have re-graded the hill to a more natural state. Other than that we have few changes.
You can see the four top caissons and get a feel for the natural grade.
That is the natural grade of the top, it is pretty steep! The flat pad is where the drill will be working today.
Looking up at our site with a new grade.
The drill rig is waiting for its driver.
Another gorgeous day!
On Wednesday we poured all but three of the remaining caissons (we have ten total!). I missed the crane putting the steel into the ground but was able to get to the site before the concrete trucks. This wasn’t too hard as the trucks where over an hour and a half late. 
Here you can see the two cassions for the bottom corners fo the house. The second one is a bit hidden by the dirt. Once these are poured and we have fixed the grading there will be concrete and steel grade beams which connect these. All the caissons will be connected via grade beams. Then stem walls will be built on top of which we will do framing. Here is an example of grade beams connecting to a caissons. The stem wall is then built up over the grade beam. 
Since we where waiting for the truck Sean had the guys build some steps after he took a nasty fall. All that loose dirt is slippery! 
We had to close off Las Flores Canyon in one direction for the trucks. By the time the concrete arrived the radios the guys where using had run out of batteries! 
This is what concrete guys do when trucks are late! 
This is what the steel guys do, they call and ask where the F*** is the mud! 
Finally! The truck arrives, we had a truck schedule to come every 1/2 hour and had seven trucks total schedule to come on Wednesday. 
Before anyone can start the inspector has to take samples, however, the samples are tested off site. Which begs the question, what does one do if the samples fail the compression tests? 
The concrete is poured into the pump and carried via hoses down to the caisson holes. 
The guys are pouring the concrete in to the holes and holding the caisson cage upright as the concrete goes in. 
It takes two trucks of concrete before you can even see the stuff coming towards the top of the hole. 
Here it is at the end of the day. There where 5 total done on wednesday. 
Wednesday evening was beautiful! You could see Catalina and Palos Verdes from our lot. Once this house is done it is going to be beautiful to live up here. 
Looking back up the lot, some day we will be out of the ground and have a structure!
I’m working on the latest update which should go out later today. In the meantime I thought I’d upload some pictures of the steel which will hold our house up. The guys did some impressive work, this is some serious hardware!
Our water meter was installed over the last week. Here is what $14k buys you!
Pretty impressive? Well not all that exciting to look at, but I am sure it will be nice to have some water up there to keep dust down, etc. Unfortunately, it feels like we are making much slower progress on the drilling front. It turns out that not only can we not drill from the road but that we cannot drill all the top holes at the same time! Additionally, in order to drill the top holes we had to cover over the middle four. In addition, we will have to re-drill all holes before putting the steel and concrete in to make sure that we have a solid footing. This is all sounding very expensive. Hopefully, I can cajole my friends to help with painting and convince Chris (Mom’s boyfriend/finance/partner/etc) to come up and help with some of the interior finish work. Chris, we can do it when the surf is good! I finally got in touch with Verizon, however, Charter who said they were going to move things still is a no-show. I’ll be meeitng with the Verizon engineer today. As you can see the lines are super low.
As you can see I can easily grab the wires. I was SOOO tempted to yank, but then I think my neighbors might get a bit mad since they would loose their service.
No more holes.
I’ll be up there again today, and will report back. Hopefully the structural engineer made it up to inspect the steel so we can push forward. Progress uber alles.
The guys finished tying up the steel caissons and we should finish drilling this week. In other news, Verizon is a pain in the ass! If you look over some of the photos you can see cables.
It is hard to see but there are two cables coming off that pole.
The cable is REALLY LOW!
Anyway, I am trying to get them to move the cables. You would think that would be difficult but not impossible. To date I have been on hold for several hours and finally got a real person’s name and number. If only I could get in touch with Tommy Hinson, perhaps my problems will be solved? I’ve talked to people in repair, safety and other customer support areas to no avail. The worst was repair, the manager Maria informed me that my neighbors would have to file an order to move Verizon’s line off my property! It took almost an hour to get through to someone that this wasn’t my neighbor’s issue but was theirs. We shall see, next up calling Charter Communications.
Here are some pictures of the new steel.
As you can see there are different sizes since each hole is a slightly different width. The front ones being much larger than the back ones.
The site has changed a lot since we first started!
This is where the steel will go! That hole is deep.
The steel came in yesterday! Also, we got through four more caissons so we are getting much closer to completing that aspect. However, we might be running into problems with the top four. We originally planned on hitting those from the top, however, due to the placement the drill rig would have to close off both lanes of Las Flores. So, we are going to have to approach those from the bottom. Also, the bottom two holes might incur additional “coring” fees. Boo! I guess there will always be some sort of cost overrun, but I sure do want to keep these down! As always, here are some pictures.
Working on the sixth caisson
This steel will be going down into the holes once it is tied up. Thanks to our neighbor for lending their front loader to get these suckers up onto the property!
Those bundles are what will be used to tie the long steel beams together.
This is the most people we have had on the site to date. The guys are placing the steel beams up to tie together.
We had a site meeting yesterday with Nathan, Sean, David (from RJR engineering), Jenn and myself. We checked out the progress on the drilling and discussed having David test the holes to ensure that the geology is all correct. Next week he is going to go down into the holes and inspect the dirt and rock. It took two days to drill the first hole, however, Hard Rock is trying a new technique using a smaller bit to get down deep and then using a larger one afterwards.
Nathan and I on the lot.
Drilling the second caisson, check out the teeth on that drill bit!
The fire came REALLY close to our road. This is looking at Rambla Pacifico which goes down to the right of the picture. To the left is the fire camp which is at the point where Rambla Pacifico and Las Flores meet. The fire never crested the ridge and appears to have been held back right at the edge of the fire camp!
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=34.062455,-118.64876&spn=0.010257,0.020642&t=h&z=16&om=1&output=embed&s=AARTsJpnOA3ioEtcI9rx_v7gyZqlolGTYwView Larger Map
Here are some more pictures taken from Rambla Pacifico.
They started drilling today! Jenn, Stephen and I drove up at lunch to take a look. Coming up the driveway you can see the drill is working on the lower right corner of the house. 
Here you can see the outline of the house as well as our temporary fencing and power. Note the four stakes at the top, those are the top caissons then we have four towards the center of the house and finally the front two. 
Looking up the hill you can see the stakes for the top of the property and the plastic fencing which is up along the road. 
It appears the fires did not crest our ridge. I’ll drive up this weekend and find how close they did come.
The House Blog 