Back on Track.....and working OT.

After 6 days the fire was declared "OUT" and the fire marshals moved in and they spent 5 days going thru everything....finding fan motors, saws, work belts, walk boards, genie lifts, extension cords, cans, and the list was almost endless at times.
And they asked, where was this, which floor and we had to draw layouts of the interior walls and mark it with everything we could remember. On Friday they turned the property back over to us and we started right after lunch to clean the remains of our dream.

We ordered 40 yard dumpsters so we could haul it all to a landfill and the driver would come up and drop one off and pick a full one up. This went on for 6 more days as we filled 14.5 dumpsters with everything you can think of. While I was still on vacation in Mallorca, I started a list of things that would need to be done first, checking the internet for resources and by the time Monday came I had already called or emailed everyone and asked that they ship the exact same materials.

Our biggest problem was the ECO block concrete walls that were 10 inches thick before the fire on the second level. Down where the footers are, they are 16 inches thick and the first level they come in at 12 inches. Because of the heat, as you can see, all the form was gone and it also had "popcorned" the walls. Some walls were down to 7.5 inches and had to be fixed. So I called and called and called and called every gunite person I could find in NC, GA, AL, KY and TN to see if anyone was between jobs and could come ASAP.

We had a meeting with the city inspectors, both engineering firms, contractor and the subs along with a Gunite firm from Nashville. It was determined to drill 5/8 inch holes and build the wall out to 9 inches. The next problem was according to the engineers there would have to be 870 holes drills in a certain pattern and 870 pieces of rebar cemented in and then hang a wire mesh over that with ties. So off to Home Depot we went and bought 5 new hammer drills and lots of bits. The Gunite people were on station in 3 days.


We ended up buying two trailer loads of fiber gunite before the walls were finished and that comes out to 31 - 2,000 pounds bags of the darn stuff.


The gunite process is an interesting thing to watch as they dump the mix into a hooper and an air compressor shoots it out the end of their hose while adding just the prefect amount of water..


Now the one thing they didn't tell us was how dusty this process was. Clouds of dust would raise as they worked. So we had to make sure everyone had a mask on that was even close to this puppy.


It seems pretty simple, just aim the hose, turn it on, and cover it. But the pressure of the hose was something else to behold.


But talk about a messy process. As you can see by Jason's right arm. The walls are smoothed and the floor is then cleaned as they moved up.


The gunite people were able to finish their work in 3 days and then we had to use a jack hammer to bust up the concrete floor and remove all the plumbing pipes that had
already been installed. The pipes that also went out of the house had to be dug back up and replaced under the concrete floor on the first level. But by day 21 we had a surprise for everyone and will post that tomorrow night..