ICF 102

The ICF blocks are like giant legos that have teeth that snap together. The ICF crew took great care to ensure that the teeth and the studs (plastic embedded in the blocks every 8”) would line up correctly. And after that, things have gone downhill fast.

For this pour, the walls will be 7 blocks high (18” * 7 = 10.5’). Here’s how things should have progressed: once the first two levels of are blocks in, they are supposed to make the walls square, level, and plumb. They add shims as needed, and glue everything down (shims and all). Then they make corner braces (out of 2x4’s or 2x6’s) and place these at all the corners, making sure the braces are square, level, and plumb. That way, after the 10.5’ wall is assembled, the bottom and the corners are right. Then they brace the entire walls to be square, level, and plumb before coming off the braces so that the walls are slightly out of plumb (between corners) for the pour. After the concrete is poured, and before it is set, the braces are used to push the walls back plumb. (Strings are run prior to the pour that help with this.)

As far as I can tell, the crew never checked for squareness. The slab is close to square, so hopefully this isn’t a big deal. They have 6 blocks up and no corner bracing. They checked for levelness at about the 3rd block high, but used a defective level, then a good level, but the bottoms of the walls still don’t look right. Shims were not glued. We also had them redo a lot of the rebar work to get the correct laps at splices and to ensure that splices were spaced apart correctly.

The pour is scheduled for Tuesday – it’ll probably be Thursday or Friday. So hopefully we will get Joe out for a pre-pour inspection on Wednesday, after the crew signs off that the walls are done.