Date: July 7 - 14, 2025
My previous blog post covered through May 10, so from the date range above you may wonder what happened to the rest of May and the whole of June? Two days after we got those footings poured, Gerry the ICF guy came out to take a look. Here is an example ICF block with the lego-like fittings. You can also see the embedded plastic bars that run vertically to give you "studs" every 8 inches, providing a way to attach things onto the wall. The plastic brackets in the middle (where the concrete goes) is to hold rebar.
He had experience building wine cellars with ICF, and although they weren't buried like my root cellars were going to be, it was great to have someone who could say "this is how it's done." For example, when I did the design I was assuming you would fill the root cellar walls and half the garage walls in one concrete pouring session, then put corrugated metal decking down on the cured walls, and have a second session to pour the root cellar roof on that deck and the remainder of the ICF walls. Gerry said no, you can pour it all at once, the metal has the strength to support the wet concrete with just a basic support beam under it. Doing all the concrete walls and root cellar roof in one pour is a lot cheaper and easier.
He had job commitments until the last week of June, so we parted with the understanding that he would send me a proposal/contract to supply the ICF blocks and root cellar roof deck, do the ICF erection, supervise the cement pour and do the waterproofing afterwards (you already have seen how much water comes through the soil, and most of the ICF will be under backfill). That left me with providing the rebar (which I'd already bought) and arranging for a concrete pump crew to do the wall pour, and the concrete would be on my SCM account. I asked him for recommendations for finding the concrete pumper and he said talk to the dispatch people at SCM (Southern Concrete) since they work with the various pump companies all the time. Good idea!
It took about 3 weeks for Gerry to get me that proposal - I suppose it stayed on the back burner until he hit the lead time needed to order the block. I sent him a check for the materials, the contract stipulating that I'd pay for labor after the job was done.
Meanwhile I called SCM and the dispatch guy was very helpful. He gave me names and numbers of two guys that work a lot north of Asheville and told me to call back if I needed more. One of the two, Jerry M, was responsive, knew just where our house was, and said he would drop by to take a look when he got a chance. I asked for prices for the ICF pumping and also for the slab that would be the garage floor, which would be the next thing after the walls were done.
Well it took a few calls to Jerry and his wife. I was hesitant to call in the morning because I knew he was probably in the middle of a concrete pour and I had a newfound sympathy for the stress involved. Every time we did talk it sounded like he was standing in wet concrete directing people. I wasn't in a big rush since it had to wait for the ICF install.
Jerry made it out Saturday June 7 and was very easy to get along with. He looked at that spring water coming down all around the footing and said we'd better pour the slab eight inches above the footing height so the 4" footing drain would ensure that the water table was always below the slab level. The slab only needed to be 4" thick, so you fill the floor area 4" with 3/4" gravel, put a 6 mil plastic sheet over that as a vapor barrier and pour the concrete on top.
This piece of advice had my panties twisted a bit. Because in my design I was trying to hold the slab to 4" above the footer, which allowed my contracted nine and a half courses of ICF to accommodate nine foot garage doors. (In an ideal world I'd have 10' garage doors but every foot I go up is another foot to climb every time anyone wants to get into the shop or garret room.) It didn't take me too long to agree with Jerry that the slab should go up, so I texted Gerry and told him to recalculate the cost using a full ten courses of ICF which makes the building 8" higher.
In other vendor news, in late May I mentioned to Mark C - my neighbor over the hill - that I was looking for a builder and he referred me to Stacy McCurry. I gave Stacy a call and he said they'd be able to fit me into their schedule and he'd come take a look-see the next day! Like Jerry, he seemed real easy to work with and said he'd email me a bid for the labor to do the "dry-in". I told him we were looking for ICF to start at the end of June and that would take a week (which is what Gerry had said), then the slab would take another week, then we'd be good to go. Dream on!
Meanwhile Gerry said he needed a place for a semi truck to unload the ICF panels that were getting shipped. Running a full length semi up Grapevine to the foot of my driveway seemed like a recipe for disaster, so I thought maybe we could unload at the closed Coates Country Store on NC 213, which is the closest to our house of any spot on the main road - only 7 miles away! There is a bunch of funky building materials there already.
But I needed to get a contact number for the owner. One day riding my bike down Grapevine, a couple miles from my house I saw Buster N spreading fertilizer on a field of corn so I rode up and asked the lady standing watching (who is his sister) if she knew who owned that store. Of course she did - how could I not know? - it was Arvol Coates. After running down his phone number, I cold called him, explained who I was and who we'd bought our land from, that it was just up the hill from JC's place (another Coates I figured he must be related to), and would it be alright to unload at his store?
Arvol said it might be tight right next to the busy highway but he lived just up the way on a quiet side road (a chunk of the original NC 213 route) and we would be welcome to have the semi unload on that road. And he had a tractor with forks to help if we needed it.
And the last piece of organizational work was finalizing the solar panels and battery backup. I got two bids - one was $5000 less than the other, so I committed to that one - Sugar Hollow. It was a bit of a learning experience when I found out that several assumptions I had made did not hold water. The first was learning that the system could only be tied to one leg of my 400 amp electrical service. The attentive reader will recall I have a 200 amp leg going to the house and another 200 amp leg going to the shop-to-be where the panels will reside. I had thought the entire 400 amps would be within the purview of the controlling software but I was wrong. Since we'll get a lot more use from the battery backup if it is serving the house, it makes sense to have the solar feed the house leg. Of course the garage/shop will take advantage of solar energy when it's available since it's on the same side of the meter as the house. But from the solar controller's point of view, that power is "going out to the grid."
The good news is that years ago I installed a 1" conduit pipe between the house and the old barn (where the shop is going) when I buried an electrical line because I knew I'd want to run internet cable out there eventually. Sugar Hollow said they could put the DC lines from the solar panel into that conduit and feed the inverter/battery backup at the house.
When I got the contract I noticed that the panels being specified had greater efficiency than the ones being used when I did the design work in early 2024. But they also had different dimensions. Panty twist time again because I'd designed the dimensions of the south-facing roof to optimally pack in 33 panels. The Sugar Hollow contract specified 32 panels but Scott assured me they'd still be able to use 33 panel layout and we adjusted the contract accordingly. I made the down payment on the solar system on July 3, just after news broke that the A-holes running Washington were going to get rid of the tax break for solar panels at the end of 2025. Meaning it has to be up and running before then.
So I caught a lucky break of sorts that the solar stuff will be tied to the house, because that means that as soon as the roof is on the new building the solar guys can get to work. That is, they will not depend on the electrical work being done in the shop since their wires won't connect to anything in the shop. So that increases the likelihood that I'll qualify for that 30% tax credit.
As might be expected, Gerry's start date slid a couple weeks. He decided it would be easier to just have the block delivered to his place, so my leg work with Arvol didn't bear fruit. They arrived with a 25' trailer load of ICF blocks on Monday July 7. In preparation I had hooked my 20' trailer to the Kubota so that I could bring the ICF up the driveway, but Gerry decided that it would be possible to get up there with his trailer. Now I know to advise against that! It's just amazing what a difference that 5 additional feet made, plus the fact that he was driving the largest size pickup truck short of a dually. The total length of the rig was 52 feet. The trailer arrived at the top with a flat tire after having ridden over the snag-rock corner in the driveway which cut the tire sidewall. [Start your flat tire counter now!]
Once we unloaded the block
we unhooked the trailer from his truck and mine from my tractor so that I could use the more maneuverable Kubota to turn his trailer around and park it in the "lower lot." As soon as I lifted the tongue with a chain around my front end loader, the rear wheels of the tractor went up in the air. That trailer was a lot beefier than mine, for sure! After a minute or two I realized that I had no counterweight since I was set up with my tow bar, which I couldn't use directly to pull his trailer since it had a pintle hitch. So I remounted the backhoe attachment on the Kubota so I'd be in the same weight class as that trailer. Even with the maneuverable tractor I had to go back and forth to get around the not-so-tight corners in the driveway.
So "now I know" the limits of the driveway better than before.
Back to the ICF work. The first couple courses are the most important because if they are the right lengths, really level and really straight, then the rest of the wall will go up easily. Any small deviation gets magnified as you add more blocks on top.
This is the point of atonement for the sins of the footing job. Gerry was unfazed. The first thing he did was create a bunch of little wooden wedges to bring everything up to a common level. Once the level is established the gap is secured with spray-can foam, like this:
The few rebar dowels that were out of place were summarily cut off and holes drilled for the correct replacements.
Rebar is laid into each course as it is added.
The trimming that you see Gerry doing there is a hole on the corner where the root cellar wall continues off the main building. The hole will have rebar through it and the concrete will flow through, securely tying the two sections together without having to make a "T" connection between 8" and 10" blocks. It also keeps the structural integrity of the 8" corner block. I was wondering how that was going to be done!
Taking a tour around the back (I'd installed some sewer pipes with slits cut in them to collect water so I didn't have to worry as much about rocks and dirt filling up my drain ditch):
The following day they brought more blocks as well as the ICF braces. The braces can be adjusted with a screw and they support scaffolding so you can work up higher without that balancing act we saw on day 2. After two days of full July sun, and with the walls cutting down on the airflow, they brought some portable shade and fans to take the edge off.
The blocks are all standard length, so when the wall length is not an even multiple, they put a vertical joint in. This gets braced with a 2x on every course. Those are screwed in to the plastic "studs" that run vertically in the blocks every 8 inches.
So when Monday rolled around they dealt with it. A compulsive sort would disassemble the wall to the point where the deviation started and build it back square. However that's a really hard approach since that rebar is in there and is quite long and overlapping. The fix used instead was to just slice the whole wall and stretch it out 1", then foam the gap and brace the hell out of it (the second set of braces nearer to corner). Well I guess the company name is "Forever Walls", not "Perfect Walls", although, for the money .... it was a little disappointing.
You can see the ends of the walls and doorways have been finished with "Fox Buck" panels and strapped. The back wall has truss hangers two feet from the top, and the front wall steps down to have the trusses sit on it. The garage door stretch is bracketed by a set of step downs were an LVL beam will sit that spans the doors and carries all the trusses.
Gerry said no need for them to do anything more so they wouldn't come on Tuesday but be there for the scheduled 9AM pour on Wednesday. I called for the building inspection.
I took advantage of Tuesday to run level 2x4 bracing under the truss hangers and screw them to it. Here is what the hangers look like:
So those two pipes run back into the wall and get encased in the cement. When I was researching the use of trusses with ICF I saw a guy on YouTube talking about what a drag it was when the hangers weren't all level and in a line. Because if one truss is high it sets the standard and everything else has to be shimmed up so that the floor above the trusses stays flat. So one high hanger causes a world of hurt. He recommended using a guide board to make sure the hangers didn't move when cement is poured down inside of the wall. And hey, I got to use my Milwaukee laser level again!
The county building inspector came out, expressed his amazement of what they could do with ICF, and signed off for the pour.
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