In Spring 2019 we made it back for another 2 month long building stint. This time with the house stable for hurricane season we swore we were going to be swimming, snorkeling, or kayaking every day. That didn’t happen. The plan was to excavate and pour the 34 concrete deck post bases so that deck construction can begin the next year after hurricane season. We also had some other small jobs to finish up, so we started with those while we were waiting for our buddy with a backhoe to have some time to start digging.
The first thing we got to was painting our shipping container house. After 2 years on site some rust was setting in, and it had gotten a little beaten up during the hurricanes. After some research we had determined that Sherwin Williams DTM (Direct to Metal) paint would be the ticket. This paint can be applied straight onto metal without having to prime first. Before we painted though I went around the container and hit all the rusty spots with a wire brush followed with Ospho. Ospho is a liquid that converts active rust into a paintable coating. Over the Ospho I sprayed cold galv, which is just a paint with a lot of zinc in it. After that we put 3 coats of the DTM paint on. The white paint on the roof really did help a lot to keep the container cooler during the day. It did take a week or so to do the painting. Due to the wind we could not spray the paint, and shipping containers have corrugations which make rolling paint a little harder than normal. Once we were done it looked NICE!
Next task was to finish the wall on the entrance to the basement and put the new hurricane door up. We also wanted to put a drain at the low corner of the entrance so that water wouldn’t pond there. I didn’t want to wreck the brand new pony wall so I used the biggest bit that I have and made a 1 1/4 inch hole through the wall.
The water needed somewhere to go so on the other side we made a dry well. The pipes are on the small side and may clog later but for now the whole setup seems to work well.
The last step was to put sand and filter fabric in the hole.
We also finished the entrance wall with the Total Wall system as we did on the rest of the house. The last hurricane door went up with almost no drama, I guess once you’ve done ten or so of them you get good at it finally!
Our high tech septic system also needed to be leveled out in order to work properly. The first time it was installed it had a bit of a tilt to it going both fore and aft and side to side. So we pulled it out and cleaned out the hole. We enlarged the far side of the hole big enough to make a space for our 500 gallon plastic water tank. The idea is to catch the product of the septic system (almost potable water according to the company) and save that to water plants with.
We never were able to get the septic system all the way in the ground as there is a huge boulder about 3 feet down in the hole. We did level both tanks with sand and then backfill them as much as we could. A future project will be to stack rocks around them to conceal them somewhat.
Talking about sand, what a racket it is! We ended up getting 5 tons of sand to the site for the tanks and dry well. If anything you would think that sand would cost about as much as on the mainland or even a little cheaper. No such luck, sand is $85/ton here versus $20/ton in Central Texas. Our shipment of sand ended up being almost $1000 by the time we got it to our house.
I started asking around about why sand is so expensive and learned about the Great Sand Conspiracy. I involves all the usual suspects; the Mafia, a Hedge Fund, and Greedy 1%’s. When you’re using sand to mix concrete you can’t use beach sand because it has salt in it. Concrete mixed using salty sand will be very weak because the salt will eventually leach out and leave a lot of voids in the concrete. So it has to be mined sand. Before the Hurricanes Irma and Maria the sand was mined on the Island of Barbuda. This is part of the Country of Antigua and Barbuda. Only about 3000 people lived on the island. The island also had an uncommon real property arrangement. The land was communally owned with each resident and descendants having rights to develop a plot for their personal use. Land could not be sold. The island was evacuated after the hurricanes because (the Government said) the infrastructure would not allow the residents to live there. This went on for several years. Curiously though, a new airport with a runway long enough for private jets began construction. The Antigua Government also passed a new law invalidating the communal ownership land structure and allowing land to be sold. And a Hedge Fund announced a project to build a large ultra exclusive (for the 1%’s) resort on Barbuda, headed by Robert De Niro (the mafia, kinda of!). The Barbudans have tried fighting back against the development with limited success. Here’s a couple of links to the two sides for your perusal: http://theconversation.com/land-grab-on-hurricane-hit-barbuda-could-leave-the-island-almost-entirely-owned-by-banks-95538
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/23/robert-de-niro-barbuda-hotel-hurricane-irma/
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/2018/02/05/de-niro-barbuda-resort/
So no sand is being mined in Barbuda. The sand in St Thomas now is imported from Guyana in South America! I suspect it comes from there instead of say Florida because of Jones Act restrictions that would make it too expensive to bring from Florida, but I’m not sure. For those of you that aren’t aware of the Jones Act it is the law that says that cargo between US ports must be carried by US registered ships manned by US crews. It’s the reason it costs more to ship a container from Miami to the USVI than to ship the same container from China to the USVI.
Soon my backhoe buddy was up and running and we were digging. We had marked out where the holes were previously.
One challenge was to figure out how to be able to find where the posts would go once we started digging. Normally you would use batter boards, but since the deck was an irregular shape it would take too many of these. So we ended up taking arcing measurements for each hole off the corners of the completed house foundation.
The post foundations are 2 foot cubes. This ends up being about 1/3 of a cubic yard of concrete or about 2000 lbs. I had done some calculations on uplift on each post with a 180 MPH breeze. The answer was almost 4000 lbs so we decided to go BIG on the post foundations. Each foundation is also going to have 3/4 inch eyebolts embedded in it to attach steel cables to. These cables will run up to the deck beams. Something we weren’t counting on is this; in Texas to make a pad like this you would simply dig a 2 foot cubed hole, put a 2×4 square around it and pour concrete. Unfortunately that doesn’t work on Water Island because of the large rocks in the ground. Every hole will be oversize no matter how careful you are. So the next 2 weeks were spent building 34 wooden boxes to put into each hole.
Just to fill the time we also made 34 rebar cages to reinforce our post bases. We also ran into the “One and a half concrete truck” problem. So in order to use a full two concrete trucks we decided to add a deck stair landing, a sidewalk, and a 15 foot by 15 foot parking pad. We needed some more rebar to do this so Cliff put some on the barge deck for us. Getting it from the barge landing to the house went like this…
It was deafening, quite a bit louder than I had anticipated. We set the forms in the ground and backfilled them. With a little less than 10 days to go on our trip we discovered that we wouldn’t be able to get concrete for three weeks. We made a command decision to delay the pour until July when we could be out there to monitor. For those of you that have hung through the Blog so far this makes 154 building days. We are also LIVE from now on!
So until a couple of months from now I’ll leave you with this…
