Two Kinds of Concrete

I am going to attempt to steer this ship away from cars and outhouses and back in the direction of concrete. The husband recently did a footing pour for a homeowner who is using pre-cast concrete walls rather than poured concrete walls. They set the walls yesterday and the husband was there, so he took pictures.

The first order of business was to find the footings. . .

. . . and uncover them from beneath a foot of fresh snow.

These footings don’t have rebar sticking up from them like a footing would that was going to have poured walls on top. They do have metal pieces, fabricated by the precast company, that were set in during the pour. The walls will get welded to those metal pieces after they are set on the footings.

Once the footings had been located, the cranes got into position to lift and set the walls:

The walls are concrete poured around 3” of foam insulation. They vary in size but are usually 10 or 12 feet wide and weigh about 12,000 to 14,000 pounds.

The crane guys know what they are doing.

Each wall unit gets set into place.

And welded to the footings.

Here they are being welded into place.

The husband left this job—his part of this build is now complete—and went back to the job where he built the bridge supports just before Christmas. The railroad trestle was set onto the bridge abutments and now he’s going to attach the decking to it. The decking has to be screwed into the steel trestle. He has all the tools to do that, although he might need to order special bolts.