We’re back in July to finish our deck footings. Our timing was perfect, we arrived on July 2nd and had a day to get ready for the Annual Water Island 4th of July Parade! The 60 or so participants really outdid themselves this year. The 4 of us that were left to be spectators were Wowwed!!! This being our second consecutive Parade as spectators we were well equipped to notice the improvements. One new addition was that Rachael the Fire Chief/Paramedic/Golf Cart Lady/Small Engine Mechanic and overall awesome person added a sound system to the Fire Truck to kick things off. What to Play? “Born in the USA” of course. In addition a reporter from the Virgin Island Daily News was there. The next day Water Island made the Front Page!
The next day it was back to work for us. The first task was to install some steel strapping around about half of the concrete forms to reinforce them. I thought they would make it without the reinforcement but my various concrete experts had their doubts. So better safe than sorry. Nothing like 14 yards of concrete running amuck.
Then it was time to set our tiedown bolts and column bases in the forms. I figured out a way to attach the column bases to 2x4s temporarily using deck screws. Each one was then put into a box form. Since the boxes were not exactly centered do to the problems we had in the digging process, some of the column bases ended up closer to one edge of the box than the other. We also had to line the column bases up with each other. Since this is a 10 sided deck each corner was 36 degrees. I wanted to have the bases on the corners facing so that they would split the difference between the 2 adjacent sides. This would make mounting the deck beams easier later. So I made a jig with strings that would correctly line up these corner bases. We also had to level the column bases within the boxes using shims. Lastly we tied the eyebolts, column bases, and rebar cages in each form together with zip ties so that they would stay in place during the concrete pour.
One of the problems we ran into with doing 34 of these footings is this: we were going to use 10 yards of concrete. Trucks that come to our Island only carry 8 yards at a time because of our hills, so we were going to use 1.2 trucks. So we started thinking of ways to use closer to 16 yards of concrete so that we weren’t wasting most of the second truck. The solution was to add a 15 by 15 foot parking pad, along with a 5 by 11 foot sidewalk/stair landing. This brought us up to 14 yards of concrete, which was close enough to 16 to make me happy.
You might notice that the parking pad is not square to the stair landing. This is because the stair landing needed to be square with the edge of the future deck.
One of the advantages of our Island is the knowledge that people bring with their past experiences. As we were digging the edge footings for the deck our neighbor who used to own a large concrete firm stopped by to take a look. He also explained that on a thin slab like this my plan to use 1/2 inch rebar in a square pattern would actually weaken the slab. This was unlike anything myself or my Engineer Wife Buttercup had ever heard of. Later he brought by a technical article from the Portland Cement Foundation verifying it. In fact, all’s we needed to do was to cut 1 inch deep relief cuts at 8 foot intervals to prevent cracking, the rebar was unnecessary.
You don’t have to tell me twice not to tie rebar so we didn’t. However once the pouring crew showed up the next morning we gave in to peer pressure and quickly put the rebar in the form. So hats off to the “Concrete Scientist” we tried but in the end were too weak to follow through!
Leo the Concrete Pumper showed up on the first barge across from St Thomas and quickly set up. I called the plant to send the first truck. They claimed they didn’t have the order because they tried to confirm the day before but couldn’t get a hold of me. They quickly recovered so fortunately the first truck was only 30 minutes late. We started with the deck forms and quickly had all but 4 done before the truck emptied out. I called the plant for the second truck but they claimed I had only ordered 8 yards not 14.5. So as the concrete was drying in the pumper we finally got that figured out. The second truck was about an hour late. Leo the Pumper had to clean out before the concrete cured in his truck so we let him go as the rest we could get at with the chute on the concrete truck.
Now we lost Nevin because we were running late and he had another engagement. So my plan of watching other people do the hard work of raking and screeding came to an end as I replaced him. Cliff about killed me with his efficient pace. We finished a couple of hours later but both I and Princess were dead. While I was doing our slab Princess had been recruited to the “Concrete Scientist” road crew that was patching a hole in the road with our extra concrete. She also did a fair amount of screeding that day.
Thank God we’re done forever with the concrete on this project! We’ll be going back for a couple of weeks after Hurricane Season to plan for next Spring when we’ll build the deck.