Shop Site Preparation

After the remainder of the old shop demolition was loaded, the site looks pretty bare.

You can see the slab where the old garage area was.  This will be covered with new fill so that the new floor will be level without cutting down too far on the near side.  It's too bad, that slab had a very hard surface and never cracked in the 13 years since we put it in.  I only hope the new floor is as good.  The building people were saying that they can just break it up and use it for fill.  Not so they decided once I told them that there was rebar every three feet in both directions.

At first we were going to have the new surface be about 6" above the old slab.  However once the old shop was down, we decided to not go as deep, but to build up the far end with fill.  This did mean a couple of quick trips to the local building supply store for concrete landscape block to hold the fill back in the far corner.

As you can see, the old slab will stick outside of the new building.  This was a result of having to offset the new building so the back corner wouldn't be right against the plantings at the right in the picture above.  We figure that the old slab will make an excellent place to store firewood.

Here you can see the site leveled with the fill in place.  The building will be just about the size of the graveled area.  All of the pole supports at the back of the building are going to be in Sonotubes (large cardboard tubes used to make concrete posts) so the wood posts don't touch the fill material.  So the holes for these were dug, the Sonotubes set and back-filled before the fill was brought in.

The last site preparation item was to drill the rest of the holes for the posts.  Three of them had to go through the original concrete slab so large enough holes were broken out of that for the 18" auger to fit through.  That wasn't too easy since I put rebar in it when it was poured.  Of course, every hole had rebar going both directions in it.  After that, a Dandy Digger machine with the auger attached was used to bore each hole down six feet or so.

The next step is the building inspector has to approve the holes.  Then the building materials arrive and construction begins.