Stay in Seattle

Stay in Seattle

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Well I spent a couple of days on one day construction clean up jobs. Then on September 10, 2002, I was sent out to a residential site in Bothel, WA where M.R. Lotze Construction was building three houses. This is the house at the top of the hill. Mickie is the builder for these three houses and contracts out most of the work such as the framing, siding, dry walling, electrical work, etc. However, the miscellaneous little tasks he will do himself.
This is the house at the bottom of the hill. With the three houses Mickie hadn't been able to keep up and several miscellaneous jobs needed doing. I was out there from Tuesday to Friday and looks like I will be out there all next week as well (and then I am off to new frontiers as it will be fall and time to start headed South). In front of the house is Mickey's new balack trailer. I loaded it with scrap lumber (three times so far) and he hauled it off to the dump where they recycle the lumber (and he gets to dump it at a cheaper rate).
This is the middle site. As they only have the forms up to pour the foundation, I am not sure it would be accurate to call it a house yet. These are nice houses that Mickie is building and should sell for about $400,000. While Mickie is conscientious of costs (reusing scrap lumber when he can, sorting the lumber from other trash, etc.), he doesn't cut corners where quality is stake.
The second day I was out there, they poured the foundation at the middle site. They had a really big pumping truck to get the cement pumped to all the areas where it was needed. Here it is shown with the supports put out giving it a firm support and keeping it level. Cement trucks would back up to its back and pour their load into the hopper at the back. Then the truck would pump the cement up through the boom.
Here is a picture of the pumping truck with the boom extended. That boom must get mighty heavy when it is loaded with cement (and so must be pretty heavy even without the cement) so it is easy to see why the truck itself needs to be so heavy (six axles, Yikes!) and have such long supports out to the sides. The truck got there at 7:30AM and they started pouring concrete at about 8AM.
Here is a picture of the guy who controlled the pumping truck on the right with the red helmet. Hanging from his belt in front of him at the controls to move the boom so that it would follow where the guy pouring the cement needed it; the controls must use radio waves to relay information back to the truck. The last twenty feet of the boom is just a large rubber hose so that the boom only has to be in the right general area and the crew can then direct the cement where it is needed. There was a crew of four guys working with the cement. One would position the hose so that the cement would go where needed.
Another would insert a gas powered device that I presume was to vibrate the cement so that it would settle well and fill all the spaces. The other two would smooth out the top, making it sure it was at just the right level. They would add buckets of cements (filled from the hose) as needed. I made a five second video of the crew in action (120K, forty seconds to download). They needed about 45 yards of cement which was 4.5 truck loads. They only ordered four (as you buy what you order) so there was a delay of almost two hours for the last truck. They were done pouring by noon and took down the forms that same day.
One of my jobs was to shovel gravel from just in front of the garage into the garage to get a uniform depth of just more than 3.5 inches for the concrete which needs to be poured there. The floor will slope about four inches over about sixteen feet from the back to the front so that it will drain nicely. In places the gravel was pretty deep (nine inches) so Mickie needed to get three more yards of gravel to fill it in as required.
Here is a five second video (120K, about 40 second download) of Mickie dumping gravel from his trailer into the garage. It has electric hydraulics to dump it. He just got it and really likes it. Previously he would have to unload from the back of his truck and that was a real bother. Now he can just dump stuff from his trailer. Cool.
For my first four days at Mickie's site, there were two guys putting the siding on the front of the top house. This is Shawn who did most of the climbing and placement of the sidings and shingles. They were a couple of friendly guys.
The other guy was Brian. For some reason I found his name real easy to remember. However, when I heard 'Brian' spoken I wasn't always sure who was meant. Anyway, Brian mostly cut the pieces and tossed them up to Shawn as needed. Here he is in front of the table saw they used.

This page was last updated on January 1, 2004