Update

It took a while to get the new contractor going - we didn't have a firm price from Baylee, and meanwhile other crews were stopping by giving us prices. We finally decided to stick with Dwain from Baylee (who did the last concrete pour) and things moved quickly. Too quickly. The last 10 days have been extremely hectic.

Eduardo and crew came out on Thursday to set the flooring. David stayed with them until the first sheet was glued and screwed, then went back to work. When he checked on the crew a couple of hours later, all the sheets were in, with the first sheet "Norboard" side up, and the remaining 64 sheets with "this side down" on top. (It was also in spanish, but to be fair, it was really difficult to read.)

The concrete pour was set for Tuesday, but luckily no concrete was available until Thursday (they would never have made it for Tuesday). The crew built bucks for the windows and doors on Friday and Saturday. (The bucks are the wood frames around the windows and doors that are attached to the foam ICF blocks.) The ICF walls were set Saturday and Sunday, and the rebar stirrups and brackets were set Monday and Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday and Thursday? Anyways, Thursday was rainy, so the pour ended up being rescheduled for Saturday.

And while the blocks were being set, another crew was setting the forms for the columns. You can see the rebar for the columns in the picture above. There were lots of problems with the columns - one of the workers hurt his arm, and they didn't always show up when they were supposed to. So it was a rush to get the columns set correctly, plumb, and level for the concrete pour. Not sure that they were ever completely fixed, but they are what they are.


Dwain would often show up on the job with a badge from the Lutheran charities Katrina volunteer organizations. Sometimes he would bring the permanent volunteers with him to show them an ICF house. We teased him about when the volunteers would be showing up to work - next thing we knew, there were 15 kids mostly from Illinois, with some from Minnesota, the Bronx, and Texas, at our house ready to work. Apparently they had run out of work at the other jobs, so they stayed busy cleaning up around the new house (including busting up some concrete slop from previous pours) and working on the jungle gym for the girls. They were a great bunch of kids.
There won't be any more work done on the house for a couple of weeks, so I won't be posting for a while, unless I just decide to bore you with SBA versus Bank loan problems, or dealing with the geniuses at the code office to get them to write a letter to say that we can't repair the old (now non-existent) house. Without the letter, we can't get our $30K from flood insurance to build higher. Nothing is easy!

Not much progress

The trusses are up, and thanks to David's supervision, are mostly level. Other than that, no progress. Hopefully things will start moving this week.

We've given up on Juan's crew setting the forms for the pilings, so David is making the forms himself. The $350 of trusses that we were scrapping because of rot/termites work perfect as one side of the square forms, so that saved him a little work.

Pat skipped town

That's what the note on the yellow paper said. Pat left a lot of houses incomplete, and a lot of outstanding bills. I'm guessing 14 houses with an average of $40K owed - that adds up to a lot of money. The business card is the lawyer that is handling his bankruptcy, but rumor has it that Pat can't file bankruptcy because not enough time has passed since the last time he filed.

Concrete pour went well

Or at least as well as can be expected. There were problems at the corners - the walls started bulging. Most were corrected before they became a problem, but the one in the picture had a blow-out (the foam broke and concrete poured out). In the picture, Joe is cutting loose the broken foam so that the rest of the adjacent blocks can be patched smooth.

We owe Joe a lot - he is the one who made the last contractor pay him back for using our blocks.

The new contractor worked out well - we are meeting with him on Friday to work out details for going forward.

Concrete Pour Tomorrow!

The concrete pour was supposed to be last Tuesday, then Thursday, then next Wednesday. Poor Juan is swamped with working 4 jobs and is trying as hard as he can to get to our project, yada, yada, yada. In reality, Juan has the people to work our job, he is refusing to until he gets paid the $15K that Central owes him. When Pat (Central's owner) told me that he would have his own crew out to set the pilings if Juan couldn't get out here by Monday, I realized that Juan is not going to get paid anytime soon.

We have paid Pat for this concrete pour, but with three delays already, lots of lies, and a hurricane heading into the Gulf, I decided that it was time to move on. So we have a new contractor to pour the concrete Saturday morning. Having them come out on short notice, on a job that they've never worked, means that we are paying a premium ($1K). That plus the $800 pump truck means that we're paying close to $2K for work that Pat owes us. But at least we will be moving forward again. If we decide to stick with this new contractor, it will be a cost + 15% contract and I am hoping that the rest of the work will cost less than what we would have owed Pat to finish.

I tried calling Pat yesterday, but nobody answered the phone, as usual. So I sent him a nice e-mail telling him that we were canceling the contract. I'm not sure if we will hear from him again. He might send us a bill trying to get more money out of us, or he might tell us we can't break the contract, or he might say thanks and good luck with the rest of the project. My guess is that one of his crew will show up early one morning to pick up their ladder and that will be the last we hear from them. Hopefully they'll pay some of their bills - I have two subs to check still, but I do know that Pat owes $6.5K of concrete and $1.5K of pump trucks on our project alone. My guess is that he will be filing for bankruptcy sometime in the next couple of months. I just hope that his bond covers our accounts.

Of contractors and openings

David's put a new opening into one of the back walls - just in case anyone else questions our "enclosure".

We are still having contractor problems. Central has been storing our ICF blocks - we checked last week to make sure that they still had them. Turns out that they used our blocks on another project, but Joe, the ICF supplier, realized this and so made Central pay him for our blocks before he would sell them any more blocks. So now Joe has our blocks. Thank goodness that Joe was looking out for us or we would have been in a world of hurt.

Central still owes us a concrete pour (not to mention that they still need to pay $8.5K worth of bills on our job). One of Central's subs, Juan, was supposed to set the forms for our pilings this weekend but never showed. David had Juan's number so gave him a call - surprise, surprise - Central owes Juan money so Juan isn't doing any work for them until he gets paid.

We are going to let Central pour the walls, hopefully sometime this week, and then we will break the contract. We will probably use Juan to finish the job, although Juan doesn't want to take the job until Central pays him - he's worried that he won't get paid if Central finds out that he's taking over. Hopefully he'll get paid this week.

Using Juan will bring its own set of problems - Juan has 200 people working for him, and they've always done great work on our project. But there aren't a lot of english speaking workers in his crews.

Twilight Zone

Our lawyer presented our case, then it was the brick wall Code Enforcer's turn... "I recommend that the Board allow the Carter's to continue..." And then I woke up. No, seriously, that's sorta how it played out. 35 minutes of discussions, but bottom line is that we can go on. I guess that when the Board got the petition from the lawyer, they did some investigating and realized that their code was written wrong. So they are going to fix it - but instead of fixing it to the way FEMA intended, they are taking out the term "fully enclosed" and are just leaving the word "enclosed". They will leave the limit under the either/or clause, so I guess they'll fix that the next time someone threatens to sue.

Bottom line, the brick wall came across as reasonable and knowledgeable and kept his prestige, and we get to move forward. And the lawyer was extremely generous in his fees, so we got off lightly there.

For now, we'll keep with Central Development - but won't be paying them a dime until the financial aspects of our project are taken care of.

What a difference a day makes. Maybe I'll actually sleep tonight!