Part of the planning was to take two years worth of vacation in a two month period. The building was arriving in St Thomas in the last week of December 2017, so the goal was to have enough time to get it erected, dried in, and hurricane ready by the June arrival of Hurricane Season. Buttercup and I arrived on site shortly before Christmas to get everything ready. We had about a week before the building arrived so we spent most of that time taking apart the broken water collecting roof from the container and general cleaning up of storm debris. Now that I had the fear of the Hurricane Gods imprinted on my brain I decided not to replace the roof on the container. Our house would be up soon enough so we really didn’t need to collect water. I also didn’t want any extra windage during the next storm on our precious container. One Christmas present that the power company left us was the broken utility pole lying across the entrance to the bunker/foundation. We ended up paying local strongman Patrick to remove it for us. The man is pure muscle, he didn’t even break a sweat as he cut the pole into way bigger sections than I would and loaded them up. A couple of days later an engineer from the power company showed up. We begged him to please place the new pole about 30 feet from the old location so next time it wouldn’t hit our house. He made some notes on his computer. Of course later the new pole was placed about 1 foot away from where the old one was planted! Two days after Christmas our real present arrived!
Santa comes, different sled though!
I had showed the truck driver where I wanted him to park the container so we could unload it. He said “No Problem” although I really didn’t see how he could do it. He showed me wrong!
Island truck drivers are really good!
Next we opened the container to see what we had. Up to this point the plan was for me and two guys to mostly manhandle the panels in position. How heavy can an 8 foot by 10 foot panel be? I was estimating around 2-300 lbs, boy was I wrong!
Gonna need a bigger forklift than 4 guys arms!
The panels are very heavy duty!
Once I started poking around the inside of the container I realized that these panels were essentially almost solid timber with a little bit of plywood on them. No telling how much they weighed, but the totally solid ones were probably more than 500 lbs. And Deltec had put them ALL the way to the front of the container, which was bad for us because our forklift couldn’t reach that far into the container because of where the trailer was parked. The next day our helpers Brian and Raul showed up to look around. We also unloaded the lighter stuff and planned for the arrival of the forklift.
One thing about forklifts, especially the cool all terrain ones, is that everybody wants to be the driver. Brian and Cliff both were certified and were jousting for the seat. I killed that bird pretty quickly, the last thing I needed was the guys who knew the most about man handling large objects to be running the forklift instead of on the other side of the operation with me. And, if anybody was gonna get to drive the forklift it would be ME!!! So we ended up getting an operator with the forklift, which turned out to be a pretty good decision later on my part. Good Job, Self!
Cliff, the Master of Rigging!
Next we started unloading the panels and setting them close to where they would end up on the foundation. We were very lucky to have the Master of Rigging, Cliff on the scene. That man really knows how to move heavy things quickly and safely. The hardest thing was getting the panels from the front of the container to the back where the forklift could get at them. This was done mostly by manhandling the lighter ones, and chains and lots of pulling on the heavier ones. We were lucky in that each panel had a set of 3/4 inch holes drilled all the way through the headers. And I just happened to have a lot of 12 inch by 3/4 inch eyebolts on the site. Would be Deltec builders, get a lot of these eyebolts, they saved us a ton of aggravation in the unloading process and were very useful later when joining the panels together. Another thing we realized was that Deltec had loaded the panels “pointy” side down. Each of the panels has one flat edge and one edge with a 40 degree angle or so. They were resting on the angled edge, which made it hard to keep them from falling flat inside the container once we removed the straps and cribbing from the bundle of panels. I’m not sure why Deltec loads them this way, it would be better for those in the field if they set them on the flat side instead.
Soon we had a system going and in about 3 hours had all the panels leaning around the foundation. And we didn’t even break anything doing it! By quitting time we had the first three up and braced. One thing to consider before starting is the order that the panels will go up. We mainly picked our first one (which was one of the ten on the round part of the building) because this panel divided the round part of the building from the square wing. That meant we had access to both sides of it. I think we did well in our erection order except for the very last one we put up a couple of days later.
Don’t break the Window!
The eyebolts through the header are very useful!
Quitting time on first day
The last thing I’ll mention is the inventory. Deltec is very good about providing EVERYTHING you need out in the field to put these buildings up. But there were a couple of things that had me scratching my head. Later on when I got smarter I got into contact with our sales rep and engineer and figured them out first instead of just assuming and plugging along. There are two different sets of plans (one labeled “Construction Site Drawings” and the other “Plans”), both of them have different details in them that you will need. So the point is, look at both sets at every phase and you’ll save yourself a lot of questions. At the most I found maybe two things in the whole erection process that either were not depicted on the plans or needed further clarification. And Deltec engineer Matt was exceptional in his quick responses to our questions which resulted in minimal downtime while we were waiting for answers.