We poured the foundation for 6th St this past Friday. I’m honestly not that motivated to write about as it was so low key and easy.  But, it is a major milestone for us as we had never poured a 9′ tall wall of concrete ourselves before.  It went off without a hitch and it gives us the confidence to strongly consider going up with a full house of ICFs.  As much as we love the process of stick framing, I love the idea of the durability of a house built of concrete coupled with no thermal bridging from the continuous layer of foam.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Allied Concrete for giving us plenty of in the field support as we got comfortable with this process. Obviously, they ultimately just want to sell concrete, but they’re smart for moving into more forward thinking products.  Now onto the more exciting pour of the day:

Any time we are getting ready mix concrete delivered, not to mention a pump truck, we try and pour anything else that we possibly can.  In this case, a large concrete countertop that will be the island for another house.  The only hitch to pouring it on the job site is that we don’t yet have a flat, out of the way place for it to set up.  Luckily, there is an abandoned old house directly across the street that has a concrete front porch that was ideal for the pour.

The owners and soon to be renovators of the house, Lou Baron and Mike Clark, were kind enough to let us comandeer it.  We’re excited to see what they end up doing with the house as they brought a lot of interesting elements into their current renovation project:  711elsom.com

We were so focused on prepping for the foundation pour that we forgot to pick up wire mesh for the countertop.  My truck was also completely loaded down with giant wall panels from our shed that we hauled over that we couldn’t run out and pick any up.

We weren’t sure what we were going to do, until our happy-go-lucky pump truck operator Allen said any of our neighbor’s wire fencing would be perfect.  Cut to us scouring for some wire cutters and cutting a giant swath out of the yellow house on the corner’s fence that is currently being fixed up.

All the Allied guys were a little surprised how cavalier we were for ransacking the neighborhood, but I knew the owners of the house were on vacation in California for a week and thus unable to protect their property.  (Actually, for full disclosure, they are friends of ours and are planning to rip out the fence in another month’s time anyway.)