Garage Build Thread

[sennister]

Got the call lastnight, we dig today.

 

[sennister]

Time to get caught up.

Contractor showed up at 8:45 on Monday and it was time to get started. We marked out the ground and a little later "Cowboy" the owner of the excavator showed up. His name was fitting the way he had that excavator bucking pulling up the stumps.

He stripped off a bunch of the top soil and piled it up for me to move to my compost pile.

He then got to work with digging the footings.

Once Cowboy got done with all his work he stared asking what else he could dig up for me. Any more stumps or anything fun? I have some more stumps but they are along the property line where the gas service line is and we never located in that area. So I didn't want him digging and hitting something. Then I remembered a rock that was between two of my accessory buildings. He asked how big it was. I had no clue as all I could see is about a 6" circle of a rock. However a year ago we had a bobcat with pallet forks and tried to pop it out but it wouldn't budge. So it must be bigger than a bread box. "Lets go get it!!!"

Well it was a lot bigger than a bread box.

We added it to the collection of landscape rocks in the front yard.

 

[sennister]

At the end of the day Monday the cement contractor showed up. I have known him for a while and his childhood home is right next door.

He looked over the work from the excavator and said everything looked good. He mentioned that the cement truck would be onsite by 2PM today.

I had to go to the office but got out of there a little after noon to work from home in the afternoon. Well I got home around 1 and not only was the cement truck gone but they were breaking down the forms as the footings were poured and set up enough to get started.

They marked out the dimensions with chalk line and started by laying block in the corners.

Once the corners were set, they started on what will be the back wall. They are using 8" block for the foundation that is underground and 6" block for the rows above ground.

They have another day or so of block work. Then insulation will be placed on the inside of the foundation wall. I spoke to the main contractor today about punching a hole through the block into the basement to run some 2" conduit that I can then run PEX through for water into the garage. The though that this will be inside the foundation and insulation so that I can leave water on year round at least to the garage. I will have to blow out the line to the pole barn but for at least this part of the run I will have a water source year round. It is deep enough where it should be fine. Where it comes up close to the ground, it will be under the heated part of the slab.

 

[sennister]

No project of this scale can go smooth and we have already run into a couple issues. I went into this fully expecting to hit the power going to the pole barn and more importantly the small garage that feeds the septic lift pump. In addition to that there is the water line to the pole barn and the internet connection. I basically told myself that we will hit all of this going into the project but I didn't want to hit the gas line from the house to pole barn. I also knew of a couple other smaller direct burial wires (3 way light for instance) COAX from when we had DirecTV on the pole barn and telephone. There was no way to locate this and even if we could, they were not part of the long term plan or have been abandoned. While it would be nice to maintain those connections, I would also like to just start over as there is some strange power stuff. Well the only thing listed above that we didn't hit was that gas line. Perfect. I don't know how deep the gas line is but everything else and I mean all of it like 60A 240V wire was all direct burial that was about 1.5-3" deep. I am shocked we haven't been shocked from digging around this area.

Back to the first issue. I have a surveillance camera that I set up to do a time lapse. I was thinking it would be cool to watch the build process. Well day 1 had an issue. The excavator pulled the stumps which I caught. Then he started digging the footings. Then stopped, asked the contractor if he should strip back some of the top soil back in the corner between the house and porch. Yep, take it down 6". Perfectly reasonable request. Well on his 3rd scrape all of a sudden the camera went dead. I didn't notice it for several hours later so I missed the entire footing dig. I did set up my Virb to do a time lapse as well but the angle isn't as good. For some reason when he scraped that are it tripped 2 breakers in the house. I don't know for certain what all died but I do know that it was my basement office area which has the Synology Diskstation which was recording the video stream, as well as my main computer and two network switches. I haven't had time to dig into the issue much but it is still dead. I powered the Synology and PC back up on an extension cord but from what I can tell half the outlets in the basement are dead now. The odd thing is the outlets in the back of the basement near where this work is being done are all fine. It is the ones on the front of the house. I was telling the contractor about this and he was at first taking it as his problem and I clarified. No, don't worry about it. I will work on it later. Maybe this weekend.

 

[sennister]

Forecast is calling for rain tomorrow. I cleared out a space for their pallet of mortar in one of the buildings so that will stay dry. They are going to try and get out tomorrow morning to see if they can get a couple more courses completed before the rain moves in. Not sure they will make much progress. At this point they will be on hold until Friday at best or more likely next week. We will see.

We might be making some changes to the floor drains. I was discussing with the cement guy and he said the grade needed for the 29' (back to front) of the garage to put the trench drains up near the door would mean needing about 3" of drop. He advised against that. I think we will go in the middle of the floor but we are going to hash that out. We still have time. I told him that he is the cement guy. I know computers not cement so I will take his advice.

 

[ReSTored]

.......Then insulation will be placed on the inside of the foundation wall.............

I'm not really familiar with garage footing/short block wall construction vs. a traditional basement footing and block walls. Should you not be putting rigid insulation on the outside of the block wall vs. inside it to protect it from freezing? Around here there would be continuous 2" rigid foam on the exterior from the footing right up to the eaves and 2" of rigid foam board + a vapour barrier under the concrete slab as well. Maybe I missed this discussion in previous posts.

 

[sennister]

I'm not really familiar with garage footing/short block wall construction vs. a traditional basement footing and block walls. Should you not be putting rigid insulation on the outside of the block wall vs. inside it to protect it from freezing? Around here there would be continuous 2" rigid foam on the exterior from the footing right up to the eaves and 2" of rigid foam board + a vapour barrier under the concrete slab as well. Maybe I missed this discussion in previous posts.

This diagram shows pretty much exactly what we are doing.

2" insulation on the inside of the block as well as under the slab. I am not sure if they also do additional insulation on the outside the block but I know there is insulation on the inside. For the water line that we are running it will be inside of this and then come up through the floor.

 

[ReSTored]

OK, I see what you intend to do. Similar to what I was referring to except we'd be adding 2" of foam board on the outside of the blocks as well + using a full 2" of insulation under the slab not just around the perimeter of the block wall. Given cost of heating long term for relatively minimal money you could use 2" foam board everywhere under the floor and get an overall R10 vs. R5. IMHO.

 

[sennister]

OK, I see what you intend to do. Similar to what I was referring to except we'd be adding 2" of foam board on the outside of the blocks as well + using a full 2" of insulation under the slab not just around the perimeter of the block wall. Given cost of heating long term for relatively minimal money you could use 2" foam board everywhere under the floor and get an overall R10 vs. R5. IMHO.

Yes, that diagram I referenced above was the first one that I found in a 30 second search with Google. It isn't 100% accurate to what we are doing but showed a pretty good diagram of it. We are going with full 2" under the slab as you mentioned. I want to say code changed on this at some point in time fairly recently where I know they require 2" of foam outside the block if it is a basement. Not sure if that also applies when it is a foundation like we are doing. Clearly the trench is big enough to add it outside as well if needed, just not sure if they are doing it.

The main goal is the prevent the heat from going down into the ground. It also helps by creating that insulation cap if you will over the dirt and granular base.

 

[williscreg]

Do you have some recent pictures maybe?
What kind of floor do you have in your garage?

 

[Henry567]

It would be great to find out some updates here. I'm going to rebuild my old garage.
Speaking about floors, I checked empire today reviews and noticed that a lot of people choose vinyl plank flooring. It is supposed to be durable. Is it a good choice? Or will epoxy be a better option?