I posted quite a while back about our garage addition and the construction quote I was waiting for. When the quote came in, it was high. Much, much higher than I had hoped. It immediately put this project on hold.
After feeling sorry for myself for a few months, I called up my cousin (a custom builder) to see if he could help me out (or at least call in a few favours with his subs to save me some moolah). I didn't expect him to take on this project himself. He builds very high end homes, and I knew that my little 14' x 19' garage addition wasn't something that he'd likely be interested in taking on.
Much to my surprise, he offered to have his crews complete it for me for less than half what other contractors had quoted me. Yes, you read that right...less than half! The catch was that we would have to find someone to complete the exterior.
Quick like a bunny, our architect complete drawings, the engineer finished the foundation drawings, and I had building permits from the town.
That's when things got frustrating...
The engineer required enormous footings for this addition. Much larger than were required, in our opinion. It almost doubled the cost of the build in concrete alone. It also would have required us to tear out half of my brand new patio and create a huge mess which would drive my neighbours nuts. There had to be another way....
After a lot of discussion with the engineer, he agreed that we could use 3 1/2" x 16' screw piles for the foundation (traditional concrete piles were not an option for us; our soil is far too sandy to drill as deep as we needed, and it still would have been a messy job). We still had to cut the patio, but only 12", I could live with that. Armed with this new set of foundation drawings, I had to submit an amendment to our building permit.
Tick tock.
Thing is, folks, 16' screw piles are hard to come by, and we ended up having to have them custom manufactured.
Tick tock.
Yesterday, these piles finally got installed. It is a slick process. It's super simple, the guys were hilarious, and they had all 5 in place in less than 3 hours. After all the drama, I was so happy to get this show on the road!
As long as the weather holds, we can expect the grade beam to be poured next week. Then walls and roof...we could have a closed in garage in less than 2 weeks!
No comments:
Post a Comment