Multi-Purpose Building Blog: It's all in the Prep work

I know what you are thinking. "The foundation is up, shouldn't the next blog post be pictures of the building going up?" Well, not really. Just like any other project, we had to clean up our mess. The first part being the huge 4 foot holes we dug in the ground. Sounds simple right? It would be, if we were in the middle of summer. But we're not. To fill in the holes, or backfill, we had to thaw out the surrounding ground so the ground wouldn't settle too much once the heat starts blowing in the building.

Out come the heaters and ground roofs again. We had stored most of the sand we dug out of the ground at the begining of this process in one of our shops. Check this out.

This is Shop C. If you've ever worked here you know this shop is notorious for being messy. It's not so much messy right now, but sandy. This picture was taken about half way through the process of emptying the shop out. There was alot of sand in there!

This is a view from the top of the pile. We had joked about making sure to change the light bulbs in the shop when we had all the sand in there. It's not often you can walk right up to a 14 ft rafter and just stand there.

Before we back filled the foundations we had to install tile. Not the ceramic type, but the plastic type. This picture gives you an idea of what I mean. This tile runs the whole perimeter of the building and empties into pre-dug trenches on the out skirts of the building site.

Here you can see we have started filling in the holes. The little yellow thing in the back ground is our compactor. It vibrates and runs along the sand and compacts it (go figure!). When we filled in the holes we had to do it in two stages. We filled the hole about half full, packed it down, filled it up again, packed it down, filled it to about 4 in from the top of the foundation and then packed it one more time. This guarantees that the sand won't settle too much.

Another project we had to do was build a ramp so we could get our equipment in the building. Here you can see our crew working on that.

One more thing left to do to clean things up; pack up the forms! Here you can see our crew banding and
loading the pallets of forms on the back of the truck from the rental company.

This is just one, of many, pallets full of forms. This is Jerry working on banding the pallets so the truck doesn't drop one on a car while driving down the road.