Site Prep and Footings

Welcome to the first day of the new warehouse build! Today the concrete contractors are getting started. 

They’re going to be putting a road in, but we had a huge amount of rain last night. But the plan is to have a driveway installed through here to the building site. They’re also going to start clearing the building site today. 

Here is the site. I roughly marked out the extent of the building, so today we’re going to finalize that once the ground is scraped. 

The guys got the grading figured out, and from the two corners they staked out, it’s only a two inch difference. So it’s already pretty flat here. So they’re going to start peeling off the grass and going from there. 

All the ground is scraped and they’ve laid out all of the footings. 

The next thing on the list is installing these 24 inch diameter footings. Our frost line is 42 inches, so it’s a pretty good sized footing. 

Most of the materials just showed up. This pallet has the posts. The ones near the top are the main ones for the side walls and the longer ones are going to be on the end walls. We have laminated posts, so there are three 2x6s laminated together to make a single post. That is a lot more stable than a solid 6×6. There’s less movement and warping as they sit. The purlins and girts also got delivered today. 

Here is the progress from day one: they got all 25 footing sonotubes installed yesterday. This took them about four and a half hours, which involved getting everything scraped, drilling the holes, and dropping the tubes in. It’s nice to be able to get more of a feel for the actual size and scale of the building now. 

So today, day 2, we have the footing inspection, and they’re going to get this road laid on this morning.

The road prep is all done. They put down the fabric, which will help keep sediment and sand and things from pushing up into the gravel, and now they’re starting to fill this trench with some road base.

While they have the truck here, they’re shuttling some of the excess scrapings to the back of the property. We’re going to use some of this up on the site to level out the back corner, but the rest of it we’ll just dump back here. It’s going to save me some disposal fees, and if I ever need some more of this in the future, I have it.

The new driveway is in. The hill has been leveled out a little bit, so it’s not quite as steep. With this driveway installed, they’ll be able to get the concrete trucks directly up here to the building, which will be super nice. 

Today, day 3, they’re pouring the footings out here. This is going to be a 12 yard pour with two trucks.

So as one team is going through and filling the footings, the finishing team is coming back and troweling them. 

Then they’re going back and setting all the brackets, which will support and attach our posts down to the footings. They are a wet-set bracket, with pieces of rebar that go down into the footing. The post sits in the bracket and gets bolted in there. The footings can be off a little bit in any direction, but these brackets have to be dead on exactly in the right place. So they’re taking the time to make sure those get installed exactly where they need to be so that our individual truss spacing is exactly the same.

So here is the completed site. We have everything ready to go, and next we’re going to start working on the walls. So next time it will be building the walls and standing them! This was a pretty quick process, only a few days to get to this point, which is exciting! 

That’s going to do it for this one. Thank you as always for joining! I greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments on the pole barn, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’m going to be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!