Life At Villa Boswell

After the land was cleared and the piers drilled, it was time to finish up the piers, the steel moment frames, and the foundation.  This post is about that process, which began about one year ago. First, let’s start with the end, or the design view of how it was supposed to look when complete. This image shows a 3D visual of the piers and the foundation as it would look with a "glass" hillside.  Because this is California, and because we have such a sloping lot, our foundation was heavily engineered and therefore very expensive.  As I mentioned before, there are 31 piers, 18 feet deep and 18 inches wide.

This image shows a rendered 3D view of the foundation, when complete.  I sure like how neat the land looks with all that nice mulch. Ha!

Following the tidy 3D views, we have the more gritty reality, starting with our family crew.  From left to right, my son Clayton (22), my stepson Brian (19) and my hubster, Chris (ageless). 

The next shot shows the retaining walls complete, the moment frames up and in place, and in the far background, the beginnings of the extensive forms that they would build to create the foundation for the main house support.

Here is the same view, but from the side.  The bottom of the photo shows the retaining wall that marks the new boundary for the lane widening that we would do.

Here you can see the first stem wall form, with all the rebar that will be embedded in the form.  Clayton and Brian along with a number of workers put all this rebar together by hand, cutting and tying each form element under Chris’ guidance.  At the bottom of the picture is the completed staircase that will lead to the main entrance of the house.  It seemed like a long time before that gap between the old road and the new boundary was filled in.

Myles helping to construct some of the forms for the foundation.

A number of our workers, building foundation forms and tying more rebar. For me, the shock was in realizing how much lumber it would take to complete all of these forms.  Perhaps if we had considered this more carefully, we might have avoided using all this lumber, given that we were trying to be as environmentally conscious as we could in the construction of the house.  As it was, we ended up re-using a lot of the lumber for other project needs, or donating it to people who could use it.

A close-up of the form for the foundation.  Can you imagine the amount of concrete needed to fill this?

It was a LOT of concrete, and the best was to fill it was to use a concrete pump truck to pour in the concrete via a flexible chute that we could direct to each form section as needed.

Here is the completed foundation.  Scroll back up and compare it to the 3D view.  It’s neat to see how accurate the 3D rendering is.  How much concrete? Well, this project that you see below, with the grade beams, piers, foundation stem walls, and retaining walls (with their piers) took 300 cubic yards of concrete to complete.  For us mortals, a cubic yard is 3 feet x 3 feet x 3 feet.  It took 40 trucks full of concrete for all of this.

The gap between the existing lane and the widened section now filled in and we are ready to be out of the dirt!