Going Up!

After getting all the holes dug it was time to start building piers. I researched as much on the subject as possible but found nothing overly useful. The few sites I did learn a lot from still didn't quite get me absolutely sure how to proceed. I talked to several people with construction experience and from what I had read and what they told me, I felt ready-ish to start on the concrete part of our build.

The one detail still not clear was how to build/support forms for the piers. I had read many stories in which the builder used the sonotube forms, but they all had holes that they could stick the tube down in and back fill around it to get support. My dirt/rock ground wouldn't even think about doing that. So I had to come up with some type of external support system for mine. This proved to be more difficult than it sounds, as my ground is full of protrusions making leveling complicated.

My piers are loosely 18"x6" thick bases with 12"diameter piers on top. I built 24-18"x18" forms, one for each hole. Then what I came up was using 2 pieces of 2x2 lumber that would span the 18" form width ,screwing these to the tube and then leveling the tube from there. All this while making sure the tube was suspended off the bottom of the hole. I struggled quite a bit with the first couple of piers but I quickly found a pattern and got better.

Since we have no water source yet, I brought in a 55 gallon drum of water to use for the concrete work. We only had to fill it once, and didn't use even half of the second drum worth. Many people tell me I should get a well drilled now and build later, but we plan on using rainwater as our only source of water. More on this in a post some other time.

I mainly work on the house Monday mornings for just a few hours, so for about 2 months, I would get 4 piers done a week. Sometimes I would get 3 done, once I got ambitious and got 6 done, but most times it was 4. We mixed each bag by hand in a wheelbarrow and this got old real quick, but we got through it.

Each pier also got a strap embedded into it which will be what we attach the beam to. I found the ready mad straps to be very expensive and began exploring other options. I found a 24" strap at the hardware store that I could bend to my desired shape easily enough. I made a jig at work out of some scrap lumber and just sat there bending away until I got 24 U shaped "brackets".

Now some progress pictures at varying times.

Here you can see my tube holding method, not pretty but it worked. You can also see my "bracket"

And this would be after they were all done. So glad to be finished with the concrete work. I later removed the large cactus in the corner there. I didn't want to contend with it later while under the house.

That's it for now. Almost ready for beams!
Thanks for reading.