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10 / 08 / 2020

Pour concrete to fill the ICF stem walls. This marks our Final Countdown to containers! Queue some Europe music right about now...Oh yeah, we love our '80s music.

Once the stem wall concrete is poured, we have to wait a minimum of two weeks until the walls can support the containers' load. These two weeks allow us to get the waterproofing and footing drains installed and the majority of back-filling completed.

Waterproofing the walls used a self-adhesive membrane (sort of like a large sticky wallpaper) installed over the ICFs. To help adhere the membrane to the ICFs, we used a primer that made the ICFs sticky…once that membrane met the wall, they were mated for life! Plus, it was fun to stick random sh*t to the walls, like David's ruler and pencils. David enjoyed leaving graffiti on the walls while Jason and Gretchen worked.

The footing drains, and back-filling allows groundwater to be drained from around our stem walls rather than push its way into our crawl spaces. The membrane provides additional protection from water intrusion.

13

09 / 18 / 2020

Below our containers, we will have two sealed crawl spaces that require the walls to be insulated. Standard concrete wall construction requires wood form and rebar mats to be erected, concrete to be poured, forms to be stripped, and then insulation to be installed.

By using Insulated Concrete Forms (ICFs), we are providing insulation and form-work in one step. Boom. ICFs are essentially construction-grade Legos that snap into each other and are erected in a matter of days versus weeks.

12

09 / 14 / 2020

We took a big hit this month when Jason's dad unexpectedly passed away in Michigan. We took solace in spending a little time in Michigan with Jason's brothers and celebrated the life of a proud father, Dziadzia, brother, and U.S. Marine.

After our trip and a few weeks of rebar delays, we returned to hit a big milestone in our construction of pouring the first concrete! We utilized five concrete trucks and a line pump to get the concrete to the far corners to fill our footings.

To commemorate at the end of the pour, we all pressed our hands in the freshly poured footings to “cement” our mark on the first container home construction in our county.