Almost, almost, ALMOST done with the form building and readier than ready to pour some concrete. I am experiencing some serious form-building fatigue.

Finding beauty in the mundane... some may see this as a sticky mess; I see it as very young amber, and I appreciate the way the sunlight plays through it.

This board just happened to land on top of a piece of the wall rebar as I tossed it into place... I thought it was kind of funny and charming.

If I die like this, it would actually be kind of funny... balanced on the do-not-step at the top of my ladder with a drill in one hand, a camera in the other, and a mouth full of screws... what could possibly go wrong? I need to have a sit-down tailgate-safety-meeting with myself at the start of each work day. Seriously.

It's amazing, the stuff that nature comes up with. If you take a moment to appreciate the intricate beauty, you'll realize that this little guy is pretty incredible. First: how can something so slow and edible survive for thousands of generations? Second: this looks like a fly that one would use for fishing. Third: how can some random act of nature be this f***ing cute?

Getting closer...

...and closer...

...and closer. Almost done. The tactile sensation as I tie the forms together is very interesting. Very much like tightening the tuning knobs on a guitar... the resonance changes, the pitch goes up, and the whole thing feels tighter. I'll make sure my house is perfectly in tune before I pour the concrete. Nobody else may notice the difference, but I will. The final walk-through will be with my internal tuning fork dialed to extra-sensitive. 

Tapping and tightening until it's perfectly in tune.

Music: Dan Le Sac - The Beat That My Heart Skipped

This was a fun day... got out to the river bar with the family to polish the shooting skills and gather rocks for the next phase of the concrete work. Followed that up with an afternoon of building at the property.

Yep, I can still put them where I want to. Shooting practice has hit the back burner over the last couple of months as I've been building the garage, so it was good to see that I haven't gotten too rusty. This was from ten yards with a Smith and Wesson Shield 9mm. Line up, draw, and fire 16 rounds as quickly as I can keep it on target, with a magazine change in the middle. This is about a 4-inch group... not too bad for a super-compact pistol. There's always room for improvement, but I'm happy with this for now. I also got to spend some time teaching my daughter to shoot with my 22 rifle... it felt like a perfect redneck Sunday.

This garage is a learning experience. You know the 14,000 steps I took yesterday, running from back to front to get the bolts through the forms? I could have cut that down quite a bit if I installed the bolts from the back side. That way, I can line them up with one hand and hammer them through the hole with the other hand. This last row of bolts went a whole lot quicker. I'll have to remember this when I'm building the rest of the retaining wall next summer.  

All of the form boards for the tall retaining wall are in place now. Moving 24-foot 2x8 boards into place gets a whole lot more serious when it's eight feet over my head. Now I just need to install the rest of the studs, tighten all of the bolts to align the forms, and I'm ready to pour concrete! 

Last shot of the inside before I close in the ends. The next time I see these, they're going to be a negative, cast in concrete.

Rocks from the river bar. These are going to be the outside finish on the short concrete walls. Shawna and the girls helped me pick these. I love that my family gets to be so closely involved in the building of our house. You can't buy this, and you can't hire someone else to do this for you... this part, building with my wife and kids and putting ourselves into our home, is the real payback from the time, effort, and money that we're putting into this project.

The home stretch...

More work on the never-ending form-building project... getting closer to pouring concrete (really!)

Chopping up a perfectly-good brand-new eight-dollar garden hose from Walmart into 10-inch lengths. Whew, that was a lot of hyphens, but I'll do what it takes to make a sentence grammatically-correct. These are going to be the prophylactic that protects my allthread form ties from the concrete. I got the cheapest hose I could find, not just because I have an unnatural aversion to spending an extra five dollars when I don't have to, but because it will kink easily. Normally, that would be a source of endless frustration and five-dollar-remorse, but in this case it's going to be a good thing. After I pull the threaded rod ties from the wall, the plan is to clamp onto an edge of the hose with vise-grips and twist-and-pull to remove it from the forms... if it kinks, it should collapse and pull out of the hole... that's the idea, anyway. I give it 50/50 odds that I'll be eating these words later. 

That's a whole lot of form ties.

Shawna pointed out this little guy hopping around on the hill behind me, eating bugs as I built forms. He was tiny, about the size of a golf ball. I don't know why I assume "he", but that's just how he struck me, so I'm going with it. Anyway... he was quite charming and brightened my day.

Getting closer... this is a garage that would make the Borg proud.

Just one more row of bolts to get through the back face of the forms. This has ended up being a tremendous amount of work; it would have gone a LOT quicker if I had someone working with me. As it was, for each of these, I had to climb out from behind the wall, hop over the three-foot forms, crawl under the scaffolding, hammer the rod through the forms, hammer the next one so that it's tight against the back form, crawl back under the forms, climb back behind the wall, line up the next one with the hole, and repeat. About a hundred times. My iPhone has this fun feature that tracks my health. Apparently, the number of steps you take in a day correlates to health. According to that metric, I am very very healthy today: I took about 14,000 steps. That translates to an average of thirty steps per minute, every minute, for eight hours. Over and under and climbing and repeat... I am tired. And happy. Very very Tired and Happy.

Another view of the forms. I'm getting so excited I can hardly contain myself. I'm about to blow concrete all over this thing!

Music 

I've had Dave Matthews Band on the brain for a few days now, specifically, Two Step.

Here's the normal-length version: Two-Step

And the extended, apparently-the-best-live-version-ever version: Best-Ever-Live-Version-of-Two-Step-in-All-Of-Its-14-Minute-Glory

Closing in the forms.

Another day of work. ...except I can't exactly call it "work", because I absolutely love what I'm doing... maybe I should call it another day of creating. Yeah... that's much better. Words have meaning, and I need to use the right ones. Creating. Building. Shaping my world like I'm a force of nature.

All of the studs are in place for the air face of the retaining wall. This went slower than it should have, because I had to dismantle some previous work to do it right. I had put these studs in place with duplex toenails, but I needed to use screws to get them in exactly the right spot. Also, pulling toenails is a complete pain in the ass. 

Isn't this an ominous photo? Chucked up with a 18" auger bit and ready to do some serious drilling!!

Here's the first of the form ties in place. The auger-bit from the previous photo made the hole between the form boards. I used these anchors to line up the studs on the back side of the wall. Mostly, I just wanted to see at least a couple of these in place to feel like I'm making some progress.

Here's my little gastropod-mollusk-buddy for the day... I think he's cute.

Nice shell!!

A return to awesome materials... I've been obsessing over form release materials. Yes, I need to get out more. The usual hillbilly method is to use red-diesel, but I am going to re-use the boards in the house, and I don't want to be breathing diesel fumes for the next few years. I was also considering buying 5 gallons of vegetable oil from Costco... but the silly part is: this 5-gallon bucket of form release compound cost $35... cheaper than any other alternative. I feel silly for spending any time worrying about this part of the project. Just get the right stuff, get it done, and move on. 

Building a cradle for newborn concrete. Getting closer to the pour!!!

Sound track: Live

Finally... done with the board form pattern! I knocked out a lot of tedious work done this weekend... for the form ties, I cut 180 feet of half-inch allthread  into 90 two-foot pieces with a Sawzall, then welded a nut onto the end of each one. Then I ripped about 75-100 more little sticks for the board-form texture areas.

Saturday was the prep-cook equivalent of the building world. "Slicing" allthread for form ties and "dicing" lumber for form patterns...

Set up to give my little arc welder a workout.

This was a lot of good welding practice. My welds improved remarkably in the course of running 90 beads around the rod-to-nut joints, and I was able to start an arc pretty reliably without sticking by the end of this. I also like that this looks like a bouquet.

Here's the completed pattern on the big retaining wall. The blank area at the lower left is where the landing and first run of stairs to the loft will be attached to the wall. I think this is going to look great, and I'm glad to be putting in this much effort now. That said... I'm very glad to be done with this part!

With all of the boards in place, I could get started on bending and tying the rest of the rebar. I'm starting to feel like this is going to be a very stout garage.

Another section of wall reinforcing done. I got about 2/3 of the low walls done before I had used up all of the available daylight. I'm thinking the rest of the rebar work should go pretty quickly; these small walls have a lot of cuts and bends and measuring, where the retaining wall will have a lot of straight full bars with only one cut per run of horizontal rebar. I'm enjoying the rebar work; working with hand-powered tools, and sometimes just hands... it's very satisfying to be able to feel the steel bending and yielding. I've heard from people who put a lot of effort into developing grip strength that bending steel (usually nails, various bars, horseshoes, frying pans, etc.) develops a kind of strength that you can't get any other way, and I'm actually starting to see some truth in that with this rebar work.