Insulated Concrete Forms

Time for a little catching up…

In the last episode we completed pouring the footings.  This episode is about forming up the crawl space walls.

We used Insulated Concrete Forms, referred to as ICFs, to form up walls.  Essentially the forms look like giant Legos, there are two blocks of foam separated with plastic spreaders, the top and bottom interlock just like Legos.   Each form is 12” tall, 13” thick and 48” long and weigh about 5 pounds.  Here Carol shows how they work.

23 pallets of GreenBlock brand ICFs were delivered on the 9^th of May, late in the afternoon.

Thursday morning we removed the wood forms from the footings and moved 10 yards of gravel into the center of the footings, this would eventually become the base for a concrete slab.

We started laying the ICFs on Friday morning.  Carol set up the blocks on the footings and installed the steel reinforcing bars, tying them together in the corners.  I played the go-fer, cutting blocks and rebar as necessary, installing the wood track on the footings that the ICFs fit into and verifying that things were square and level.

It took us only a few days to assemble the forms.  We even took off time to have supper on Saturday evening at the Sylvan Lake Lodge Restaurant to celebrate Mother’s Day.  The atmosphere, the food and the service were exceptional, we highly recommend it.  Sunday we worked part of a day and went climbing with Mark and Cheryl in the afternoon. 

Monday the 14^th, we completed the south wall about noon, as I was walking up to the garage for lunch, I felt a gust to wind and as I turned back toward the wall we had just completed, watched it blow over in slow motion.  We rebuilt the wall on Monday afternoon and got it braced for wind.  We also completed the forms for the tower, which were also ICFs but were manufactured by Dow Corning and called Fold Forms because they fold for transport.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Mark Strege was on site, he and I built the shoring system to hold the walls straight during pouring.

Carol and I worked on Thursday on miscellaneous odds and ends finishing late in the evening.

The crew from Jenniges Masonry arrived about 1:00 pm on Friday in a caravan with the concrete pumper in the rear.

Twenty minutes later the first of three concrete trucks arrived, each discharging 9 yards of concrete.

Immediately we had a blow out in a transition piece between the tower section and the main part of the house.  The site of the blow out was where we changed from Greenblock brand of Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) to Owen Corning Fold Forms.  We worked for about 10 minutes feverishly and got that section braced.

The concrete crew worked their way around the forms in a counter clockwise rotation.  The GreenBlock stood up to the onslaught of the concrete pumper, the walls literally danced under the force of the concrete stream. 

The last part of the wall to be poured was the tower section and we had a couple more problems with the Fold Forms but managed to get everything secured and there was no major damage.

90 minutes after they arrived they left and we sighed a sigh of relief, no longer did we need to worry about the walls blowing down!