Concrete is done! They were good using my forms as is and they held up fine. Got the whole process done in one day - 5 trucks of concrete pumped to the site, power floating, and saw cuts (they had a cool new blade that lets you cut as soon as it'll hold your foot weight- they made very nice cuts without the plumes of dust you normally get cutting dry).



Doesn't look quite as pretty post saw cut due to sweeping up the dust, but all of that washes right off.



Managed to make some impromptu sandbags to block off the door openings. Filled it with an inch or so of water to help the curing process.

I'm midway through refinishing the pool (repaint and plaster cracks repair), so I can't really start on building this yet anyways. Maybe in a couple weeks I can start actually building something.

 

And a daytime pic:



Put the sprinkler on a timer to keep it topped up.

 

So the truss designer added these lateral braces as an alternate so I could leave the interior open for now.[/QUOTE]

The lateral bracing is usually 2x4 and you will see them located one the truss design page and they should attach to the end walls and on each truss depending on the width of the truss you might have up to 3 pr 4 rows. The purpose is to stiffen the trusses and keep them from (racking), takes the shake and vibration out of them in the wind.
Local code may call for truss clips to be installed on the top plate to attach the truss to the to plate rather that a toenail attachment. They can be found at a Lowes, or Home Depot. Make sure you use the recommended fasteners instead of a roofing nail. I am attaching a guide for you. Tell your wife she needs to start working out so she can help you with them Trusses, Lol Yeah my wife never came outside to help with anything on my shed.

https://www.cascade-mfg-co.com/media...to-trusses.pdf

 

Unfortunately the only permanent truss lateral bracing originally specified on the truss drawing was the roof sheathing and the drywall (its a flat roof, so they're very shallow). No problem with the roof sheathing as that must go on to install the roof anyways, but the drywall on the interior side was my issue. It would've forced me to put on ceiling drywall to finish this first permit which is problematic as I won't have insulation / hvac ducting/ electrical done (as this permit is shell only). So Id just be putting up drywall to take it back down again on the second stage permit which would really suck. To be fair to the truss designers, I did ask them to design for the weight of all of this stuff up front- so they probably assumed I was doing it all at once like someone would with a house.

Luckily the truss place was easy to work with and added those Simpson truss ties as an alternate lateral for the interior. They probably would've approved 2x4s like you mentioned too, but the pre-made ties were cheap enough in bulk that I just went that route.

It is required, but Im thinking about going a different route. It looks like the requirement can also be met with one of those top plate to truss long structural screws. They're a little more expensive per connection point, but it would seem to save a ton of time putting all of those nails in each clip (vs just banging a single screw up from the bottom of the top plate). I did those clips on my covered patio project, and it seems like this would be a lot faster / easier.

LOL, thatll go over great

IMO it's the length thats the pain on these. They're just under 200# each so we'd normally have no issue lifting it if it were the size of something like a suitcase. The hard part is the huge torque arm it has being 40 foot long. I think getting a 3rd or even 4th person would make a world of difference as you can cut that 40 foot gap between hands down to 20 or even 10 feet. Not to mention the direct weight reduction dividing the total by more bodies.

 

LVLs are in for the door headers. Last piece of 'specialty' lumber for the job - the rest of the stuff I can grab from the local lumberyard as we're ready​​​​​.



I was surprised how tough it was to track these down locally. In the whole metro area, it looks like there are only half a dozen places that deal with engineered lumber (excluding trusses) and about half of them only sell direct to contractors. The local lumberyards don't seem to touch them for some reason.


Also a big milestone today - shut off the water to the garage from the flood curing. Letting it dry on its own to evaporation so it'll probably be a few days before the surface dries up.

Planning to go pick up the sill plates this weekend. I'll get those squared up/ marked / drilled for the j bolts. Then we'll get a first lumber order in to get the studs.

 

Surface is almost completely dry now save for one small puddle. Core is still damp and there's a lot of caked on white dust from the joint cutting thats been underwater for a week so it doesn't look beautiful yet. I'll spray it off with a strong hose nozzle once the ground around it dries out a bit. The sand bags didn't seal 100%, so its already a bit soggy around all of the doors.

Started pulling the forms off and got about 25% done. Only disappointment is that I didn't spend more time getting the vapor barrier flat up against the forms. No structural issue, but the 'veins' it imprinted from the wrinkles are a bit ugly. Oh well, almost all of it will be covered up anyways - the driveway will mate up flush to the door openings and grade will be slightly below that everywhere else. A couple inches of the curbing will get covered with weep screed for the stucco anyways, so there won't be more than a few inches of exposed foundation in the end.

 

[QUOTE=bumpin96monte;733839]LVLs are in for the door headers. Last piece of 'specialty' lumber for the job - the rest of the stuff I can grab from the local lumberyard as we're ready​​​​​.



I was surprised how tough it was to track these down locally. In the whole metro area, it looks like there are only half a dozen places that deal with engineered lumber (excluding trusses) and about half of them only sell direct to contractors. The local lumberyards don't seem to touch them for some reason.

That's because they would have to design for the load it was carrying. But the truss company should have them available because they have the design capabilities

Remember that the folks they are hiring today missed a bit of schooling do to the pandemic they don't want to work either.
Plus they will use the TERMS (FOR SELL) rather than (For Sale)

 

Luckily these aren't custom LVLs. The LVL design / selection was done up front and was already specified on the structure prints. A standard shelf stock LVL dimension was selected (11 7/8 x 3.5, 2.0+ E) to meet the strength requirements, so it was just a matter of finding a place that stocked the correct height/ depth/ modulus material.

The reason I was surprised that they were hard to find is because back at home, even a common hardware store like Menards offered a dozen or so of the more typical LVL sizes on the shelf. Home Depot / Lowes both offer zero options out here (no Menards locally, and I'm sure shipping them cross country would double their price). 84's website says they do, but apparently they only do them at certain stores - none in my metro (I presume that means they make them to order in house). Same with the other local lumberyards close by- they're strictly dimensional lumber + sheet goods.

The truss company I worked with didn't do anything besides just trusses unfortunately. Maybe some of the other truss companies I'd reached out for quotes for did, but honestly I hadn't gotten that desperate to reach back out to them (as I never heard back from most, and the 1 that did respond with a quote never answered my questions about the errors with it - like having 3 'end wall' trusses quoted for a simple rectangle building). I figure if they can't be bothered to respond on a $10k+ truss order, I suspect they'll have even less enthusiasm for selling lvls at a tenth of the price.

The place I ended up getting them from was a mostly dedicated engineered lumber place. They had a small lumberyard on site (maybe 1/3 the size of a big box store), but most of their inventory was engineered wood products (glulam, lvl, lsl, I joists, etc). Worked out perfectly - no wait at all as they had them on the shelf in the size I needed.

 

Things sure haven't gone to plan the last few weeks. I was hoping to get on the garage while it was cool, but things keep coming up.

We were doing our every other year refinish of the pool. It's an older pool that frankly needs re-plastered. The previous owners slapped a fresh coat of cheap paint on it and we didn't know any better having not had a pool before. Turns out the beautiful blue paint fades to nearly white in a year from sun + chlorine. Then it starts to bubble up / lose adhesion over the course of the 2nd year.

So we're now in a routine of sanding the pool down to mostly strip the new paint / remove the blisters and repainting with the same stuff (to avoid adhesion issues mixing paint types) every other year as a band aid until we're ready to tackle a redo of the whole pool. The decking is all broken (poorly laid out concrete joints), the plaster is cracked, and the fountain is leaking so it'll be a pretty major overhaul when the time comes.

Along with that refresh usually comes some minor plaster cracks that show through the paint (but don't leak water yet via dye test) that we grind out and spot fill to keep from spreading. Unfortunately this year we ran into our 2nd crack through the concrete shell. Ended up having to grind the crack open, cut out spots for post tension steel stitches to sit, and then cover it all with hydraulic cement and re-plaster it all.

Finally got the refinish and repaint done and water back in it after a week wait. But it definitely burned up a lot of free time in the process.

 

Ended up pushing forward on the rest of the driveway project to connect the RV driveway we added all the way back to the garage. Itll be a lot easier to get materials transported back there if we've got solid surface from the street to the garage. I bought a used pallet jack a year or so ago so that would be a real back saver for material transport.

Unfortunately I ran into issues proceeding as we were already halfway through a drainage project on the existing 70 feet of RV driveway. When we put that in, I didn't realize how much water that chunk of dirt was being forced to absorb. We also made matters worse with the covered patio project.

So the house roof is a single slope to the rear. A large portion of that now drains on to our new covered patio which is single sloped to this RV driveway. So there's probably 2kish SF of roof feeding into this one area.

To make things worse, the driveway to the street is sloped down towards the house/ attached garage. So half of the rain from the street and all of the rain from the front driveway (as I put up sand bags to keep the water from going into the attached garage) is also forced into RV driveway area. It isn't uncommon during our rainy season for that driveway to go partially underwater.

So our fix was to dig trenches down both sides and install regular drains to catch water - all dumped into a double dry well out in the back yard. Problem is it has to cross over under the driveway - so we had dug a trench where the 'new' driveway will go. I needed to get the rest of the piping in and concreted over to allow us to proceed with the rest of the driveway.

As of this weekend, the piping is run up to where it diverges from the driveway to head to the dry wells, and we've fill concrete up to the top of the trench (6" below the height of the current driveway).

The concrete place is tentatively scheduled to come out next week to start prepping for the driveway pour.




The other 2 pipes are for irrigation. We eventually plan to add trees along the fence line to cut down on road noise, so we wanted a way to plumb automatic irrigation to them while we had the trench dug. Will cut and run them underground, but left them way over tall for now to easily locate them when we're ready.

I went ahead and picked up the pressure treated sill plates so we can start layout on the garage soon.