Week 125 (Loggia Slab, Part 2)

At long last, the main building is edging toward completion. The Loggia had long been the unfinished piece: last to get a roof and last to get a slab. But now that work is done, and it is gorgeous:

Here’s another perspective:

There’s still a bit more work to do: the concrete needs to be sealed, and then we can put the glass storefront around it, but there’s still work to be done after that. We have to work out some complex door threshold issues, including on the one hand ADA compliance, which requires a maximum of a 1/2″ vertical drop at any threshold, and the realities of waterproofing an exterior opening, which really want inches of vertical space to protect from wind-blown water. I look forward to seeing how we balance these competing issues.

Speaking of rain, we got plenty of it early in the week. Here you can see our small green pump working overtime, up to its throat in water:

Soon we’ll be building a drainage system that will have gravity doing all the work for us. When the site is this wet the concrete trucks cannot deliver. As you can see here, the site did ultimately dry out, barely:

The Loggia surely was the focus of our concrete work this week, but it was not the exclusive focus. We also finished pouring the concrete for the small equipment corral:

The rain may have delayed our Loggia and Corral work by a few days, but nothing seems to have slowed down our framing crew. They have really picked up the pace, as you can see in this sequence of photos showing the framing of the Annex. Here we see the double-wall of the Annex Control Room:

You can see (if you look closely) that’s it uses a double-wall construction. The outer framing members are on top and bottom plates that are completely separate from the plates anchoring the inner framing members. The gap between the two plates is one inch. Here is another view:

Groovy!

Across the garage, the Lounge wall is also coming up:

Opposite to that, the garage wall on the other side is built with lots of blocking, for shelves:

A few days later, drywall! Here’s that wall nicely covered:

And the garage side of the Lounge Wall:

Here’s a detail of the beam going across the garage. It’s a pair of LVLs bolted together with a 1/4″ (?) steel flitch in the center:

The Annex CR is now conspicuously awaiting its sheetrock treatment. I believe the outside wall will be two layers of 5/8″ with Green Glue sandwiched between, and the inner wall will be three layers with Green Glue between two of the three layers as well: