Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Work Begins on the Tod Enginehouse


Now that we spent another $1,500 for a civil engineer to design a stormwater retention system for the Heritage Park property, the Youngstown Engineering Department has given its approval of our building permit application. This only took about eight months to accomplish! Now its back to the building dept. to review and hopefully they will sign off and we can finally obtain our building permit.
I have started construction of the wooden concrete forms for the building's eight piers in my garage. The photo shows three of the four panels made up to form one pier. We will pour the south four piers first, three will be eight feet tall and the west pier will be ten feet tall, due to the fact that the property slopes from east to west. Under each pier will be a 6' x 6' x 12" thick reinforced concrete pad to spread out the building load to the soil. I'll be doing the excavation, formsetting and rebar installation just as soon as possible so that we can pour concrete without much delay.
When the south four piers are finished I'll move to the north side and repeat the process there. On the north side the process will be a bit different since there will be concrete infill walls between the piers. This will require pouring a continuous footer between each pad. I will make regular entries to this blog during every step of the way of the construction of the enginehouse.