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Behind the Build: Concrete Foundation 150 150 Administrator

Behind the Build: Concrete Foundation

An overview of the Scott Simpson Design + Build process of creating a concrete foundation for a new construction home – cement conveyor, remote control conveyor belt, concrete forms, agitation, form recycling and more!

Enjoy our video series of this new construction design-build in progress!

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Video Transcript

Alright so today we’re pouring concrete at 1020 Butternut. We’re moving the concrete from these concrete trucks onto a conveyor belt up and over and they’re pouring into the actual foundation wall. So timing is everything here, there’s about $5,000 worth of concrete in that truck.

He’s lining the chute up and the guy in the orange shirt over there can control the conveyor belt from like a video game console right here on the actual site. The question is how fast can we move that concrete from that truck into those concrete walls? This conveyor belt is probably delivering 2,000 pounds of concrete every minute. If we didn’t have this conveyor belt we’d have to wheelbarrow it or shovel it. It would be much much harder. We’ve done it that way and we can do it that way this just makes it faster.

This is a concrete form – this is the backside. It’s got a steel structure that makes it strong, as the concrete puts a lot of pressure on this side. This is the inside wall, and this is the face of the concrete wall. Each one of these things comes pre-made 24 inches by 48 or whatever and we keep building the wall – it’s sort of like an erector set. They snap it all together, they make sure it’s all square, they pour concrete in the middle of it, and then they break all the little parts and pieces out that they strip this wall off. And when we’re done, there’s a standing concrete wall.

These are form ties. This is a high tensile piece of steel that they clip on either side. As the concrete drops into the wall it creates a huge amount of force on the actual concrete form work. If these guys miss these things, that concrete wall will actually unzip under the pressure and collapse. So there are guys that are constantly walking around making sure that all of these are holding or staying intact.

So, that’s the actual concrete wall formed together as they drop the concrete in they fill up the form work and then when the concrete’s cured, they can break the forms off and you’ve got a standing concrete wall.

The guy standing on top of the wall right there, the concrete goes in, he vibrates the concrete so it can spread out inside the formwork and makes a nice smooth concrete wall.

This is Wednesday we poured the concrete walls on Monday morning and so the guys are here and they’re starting to strip the formwork off the walls. So you can see these are short wall forms right here, he’s breaking them off. They split them off the wall and you can see the concrete foundation. This is the chimney. You can reuse this formwork over and over and over again, so they’ll take all these forms, pull them out of the hole, put them on the trailer and take them to the next job.

When all this framework has been removed, the last step in before we actually backfill the foundation wall is we’re going to waterproof the foundation to keep the basement really nice and dry. Once that gets done we’ll have a couple more inspections, we have a drain tile that’s going in to keep the basement dry as well. Then we get those inspections done, we backfill and then the concrete work for the foundation is done.