The slab is normally poured once the house is dried in. I asked my neighbor that does concrete work why this is. He said that there are a couple reasons. One, to prevent damage. The framing crew drops a lot of things. Hammers, tools, beams. All of these can chip the concrete.
Two, framers are slobs. They'll drop plenty of things on the floor and not clean them up. All of the nails, sawdust and scraps will end up getting wet, holding water and leaving stains all over the concrete. No one wants rust on a new floor.
Three, sometimes people fall down open stairwells. This one is mainly for me. Stone over clay is a lot softer than a finished concrete floor.

Usually they cut a hole in the floor of the framed house and stick the chute in there then close it back up once the floor is done. Mine has two stairwells to choose from and they can drop a chute in either.

With a foundation this deep, you can't backfill it all at once. You risk putting too much pressure too high up. The full cure of the concrete and deck on top alleviate this issue. I did the first four feet and then the remaining couple feet of waterproofing could be finished. At this point I need to run all of the downspout piping around the foundation and connect it to the 6" drain pipe on the side of the house. Both of the sump pumps will connect to this piping. At that point I don't have to worry about water anymore.

I have two connected sumps, with a backup generator incoming. Even then I'll add the water backup pump. Also, I have water alarms outside each sump planned. I have one on my current sump and it's saved me before when the float stuck.

Funny how things work. Power went out 4 times yesterday. I hadn't used the generator since at least April, but we discuss it here and the power goes out. The main outage happened just as my furnace was about to be installed. They were thinking that they'd have to delay, but I hooked up the generator, flipped the switches on the transfer panel and we were back in business.

We haven't had a furnace since May. The old furnace was a POS builder's special from '94. I was praying that it would survive until we sold the house or added on. It met the challenge, so I rewarded it by ripping it out and throwing it in the dumpster 6 months ago. I told the kids that we were going to have a summer from the '80s. That means it's hot and you get a fan, no AC. Fortunately, summer ran long, and winter hasn't kicked in yet. In the meantime, we've been heating the house with a couple space heaters. Today has been the coldest day at 28ºF.

We now have heat in the house again so that's quite the pre-winter milestone. No more space heaters and 2 warm rooms.

The basement floor will be poured next week, and I'll complete the downspout piping and backfill should be done as well. At that point the only remaining task that I can work on is building the basement stairs from the garage. At that point it's ready for winter and I can haul some stuff down there.

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I might mess with it if i build a new server, but my setup works flawlessly with no chance of data loss.

I'm running sonarr, SAB, Radarr and Emby. I should really set up docker. I've been meaning to learn to use it as well. I've always wanted to put in a GPU. What one did you end up using that worked well?

I've been running Emby since it was MediaBrowser and running through xbox 360's. Before that I was using Media Center. That was nice, but the compatibilities of the video formats were a nightmare.

I finally got my camera back up. Wind snapped the ethernet cable that had been beaten by the weather since May. It's not an outdoor rated cable, so i'm taking my chances anyways. We've been battling some wicked winds the last few days and I'm doing whatever I can to keep the tarps on. They made it through a windstorm with gusts approaching 60mph.
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First part of the basement floor is going in tomorrow morning. I threw a camera in down there to catch the pour.
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Radon is not really that prevalent here. Since my soil is entirely clay and I don't have any shale layers, it's even less common.

Floor pouring round one is complete. It looks fantastic. The rest will be done tomorrow morning.
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It'll be sawcut. With the heater down there, I've also been monitoring the temperature. Without any heat, it's stayed about 8-10 degrees above ambient temperature. As soon as I complete the backfill, it's possible that it'll have even a higher delta with the bottom of the wall being 8.5' below the surface.

Pour complete. They did an awesome job.

Exactly! I'll gladly help out someone when they do a good job. The camera is more for security as I don't really want someone to just go and sleep in my foundation, but then I can do cool stuff like this as well. I do inform everyone that comes to do work here that there are cameras around. It covers me and gives them a nice video. I did catch the owner of the foundation company that i used, stealing my extension cords. I back charged him for those.

It's really a full house build, disguised as a game room build. However, at this point, I can actually see where the games will end up going.

Sometimes things just don't go right. But sometimes they do....

Concrete Morons part 2.

So, I noticed the back wall was bowed. This became more evident once the floor was in, but I did notice it right after it was poured and the forms were off. With the floor in it was really evident. I finally got a level on it, and it turns out that the bottom was bowed in 5". Now the top was straight and square, but suddenly I was concerned about the load bearing capacity of the wall. This part of the house has a tub right above it which is the single largest point load in the house. Up to 1000 pounds.

You can see the beautiful handiwork.
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The architects punted and said cut the wall out and put a new one in. Just what i wanted to do. Dig it back up, remove the waterproofing, drain piping, support the deck, cut out 35,000 pounds of concrete, dispose of that, and repour and redo the rest. I'm an engineer, albeit a mechanical, and I discussed it with a retired civil engineer friend of mine. Since it's a gable roof over this wall, all of the loads are pushed off to the side walls. We have a snow load of 50 pounds per square foot here, so the roof load is a concern. We both thought it might be fine and worst case, there could be a wall poured outside and rebared to the existing to shore it up. But even then, we both thought i should find an expert.

I hunted down a structural engineer with 40 years' experience and explained the situation and the possible loads. After a couple days he came back and said all is well, due to exactly what we suspected. The gable roof deflects the roof loads. Seeing that the wall hasn't cracked from the pressure from the soil backfill he said if it was going to fail, it would have already happened. Also, the location of the tub was over a spot that didn't bow very much.

Huge relief after weeks of stress.

Here's a drawing of the actual situation. Red is the footer, green is the top of the wall and blue is the bowed bottom of the wall.
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That's basically described our life for the past couple weeks. My wife cried tears of joy when i told her about the email. She's been in deep on this from day one and the thought of moving backwards in any way was killing her. Considering all of the additional work and potentially dealing with small claims court and the headache that would bring, this is the best-case scenario.

Honestly, i can't wait to put up some walls and never have to look at this piece of shit foundation again. I'll know it's there but won't need to see it and get a reminder on a daily basis.

The basement is just waiting for spring. I needed a place to store things just to get them out of the weather. There should be a load of windows coming any time now, since I ordered them on 11/5/21. I honestly had no clue that windows would take 3 months, but then again, why not? All building materials are a mess right now. I can at least store them down there when they do finally show up. It dries up down there and then gets completely soaked depending on the weather. The tarps leak a bit unfortunately. You can see how the upper portion of the wall is much colder than the backfilled portion as the humidity condenses on it. The heater down there keeps it at a steady 41ºF, so there's no worry of things freezing. A fan goes on for 30 minutes of each hour to keep the air moving and a dehumidifier is running constantly.
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I haven't built a good set of stairs in 20 years. It was good to finally do it again. These are only temporary though. The final design has a platform up on top. My version leads to the death hole, otherwise known as the open porch shaft. There are planks covering it to prevent death though. I've learned!

I've been going through the plans like crazy. Found some mistakes and a missing beam. I guess this is pretty common from architects and builders just adjust on the fly.

I finally made it to an orthopedic doctor to figure out what damage I caused to my knee. I had no idea that the appointment lead-time would be 5 weeks, or I would have made the appointment a lot sooner. I had x-rays done and the doc moved my knee in every possible way, "does this hurt? does this hurt? does this hurt?" I was just waiting for the one where I felt death, but that never happened. I could describe one motion as uncomfortable, but that's it.

The diagnosis was that I ripped 90% of my MCL off the femur. "You sure did your best to pull this thing off." Since there was some still attached, the bone grew back out to the ligament and reattached it. Who knew that was a possibility? He showed me on the x-ray what looked like some dust on the side of the knee against the mcl. That was fresh bone growth. I hit up physical therapy a couple weeks later and all I have to do is keep stretching to regain the flexibility that I lost from not moving my knee enough for three months.

Windows have been delivered after 3 months of waiting. They're all sitting in the basement, waiting to get installed once the roof is on. I have two more loads of wood to buy for the ceilings and rafters/roof and then 5 more steel beams. Unfortunately, wood skyrocketed again, but hopefully that'll come down a bit in the next few months.

I should be starting to build walls in about 5 weeks, once spring hits and the clocks change.

Since I have nothing else to do but push water that leaks into the basement over to the sumps, I've also been working on the layout of the basement. Here's the latest and greatest. It will obviously have far too few spots for pinball machines for many of you. But this is also a very long-term plan. It may change at any time.

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I think the door may go where the darts or arcade machine are. I haven't gotten into the theater design much yet. On www.avsforum.com, the recommended max small theater size is 16 x 23. Once you go beyond that, costs go up exponentially. So, for right now I just wanted to reserve that footprint. I'm not sure whether I want to have speakers behind the screen or not.

They're just potentially walled in. My wife asked me how it would be if the kids were wild in the basement. Would it be like we were in the same room if we were sitting upstairs in the great room, where the staircase heads to the basement. I said, if need be, we could wall them in and just made the design reflect that, just in case. All 5 of us are typically in the same room every evening during construction. I know she's itching to have a space of her own.

How is the sound transmission up your staircase?

Under the stairs from the garage/outside, in the lower right.

With the current Pin-flation, I hope i can afford another 18 machines.

Since I'm still just waiting on the weather, I've been messing around with Revit and Lumion to do some renderings. I'm going to have to make one of the basement layout, but this is fun to mess around with. Here's the first-floor kitchen and great room.

Those two columns will likely become integrated in some form of room separator to make them look nice. But now that I'm looking at it, I might be able to combine that into a single column....

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