Pecan Grove (www.pecan-grove.net) Pecan Grove and Senior Residence

Carpenters have been busy putting the wall puzzle togther.  It goes fast and neat when they’re all built offsite.

Walls are plumbed and aligned by Saturday.  Roof trusses are delivered and await a crane to help set them in place.

The well is complete with pump and tank set and just needs electrical power to pump water on demand.  We tried a generator but it takes a lot of juice. 

The drive to Jack and Leona Newman’s site got a culvert in the creek so heavy trucks can cross.  The drill truck showed up to take a sample of the soil where the house pad will be.

The local electric company finally got us in their schedule and looks like they’re serious about getting us some power.  Equipment and materials are stocked for underground service installation. 

The Rosamond residence is waiting on windows which arrived Thursday and these porch timbers which are getting mortised and tenoned for assembly. tgh

After seven days allowing the concrete to cure, the steel arrived for erection.

The lower beams border the vaulted ceiling of the Great Room.  The high beam is the ridge.

The wall framing arrives in prebuilt sections.  It should take only two days to raise the walls.

On Wednesday the drilling crew arrived for the water well.  By Thursday they had finished drilling – final depth 385′.

 Friday the casing was inserted and cemented in and Monday the screen was installed.

Drilling part is done, now we just need plumbing and power.  tgh

The day of pouring the slab on the senior residence was quite exciting.  It started at 3 a.m. because the concrete plant had a full schedule.  Weather was perfect for pouring concrete, cool and somewhat humid.  Things got hotter once the sun came up. 

Trucks woke me up at 4:00 a.m.  After deciding I was not going back to sleep, I got up and went to the site.  I found the concrete pouring was well underway.  By 5:00 half the concrete had been placed.  This job will take an estimated 360 yards.

At 6:00 color was showing in the sky over the lake.  Sunrise at 6:30.

Once the concrete is hard enough to walk on, a machine is used to level out the minor variations of slab height.  A boom pump truck is used on jobs like this because of slab size and site conditions.  This truck can place concrete up to 130′ away from the pump at 3-4 yards per minute.

This is about the 35th truck at the pump.  Notice the man in the safety vest with the remote controls for the boom.

It’s 5 hours after the first concrete truck.  The slab by this time is quite hard.  There are no breaks for the men.  Anything that needs to be done to the slab has to happen now or it’ll be too late.  They have begun to apply the curing compound on the far end of the slab.

The finished product. Red lines on the left are where they started laying out saw cuts to control future cracks in the slab.  The boy is cleaning up some recessed bolt threads where steel columns will go. 

Now that there is a foundation, y’all will have to check back more often.  Things will progress more rapidly than they have in the past few months.  tgh