Upper walls are done!

<p>It has been a crazy couple of weeks but we got the job done. It has been tough to get any work done with the time change. It is always dark when I get off work now. Any ways I took off work Friday-Tuesday. The Sunday before we did prep stuff. For anyone who is going to do this you really should have at least 2 miter saws and 2 table saws. One miter saw should be set up with a 12 inch metal cutting wheel. This will make cutting the rails way faster. The other miter saw can have a normal blade for cutting the foam. One table saw should be set up with 2 blades and it can be used for adding the groove back to the foam that is ripped on the other saw. When we did the basement walls we only had one of each of the saws. Our progress would come to a screeching halt when we needed a cut. Keeping people supplied with material is the biggest slow down of building with icf. I had the framer prebuild all the window bucks and we put the 2x6 bracing on all the corners before hand. I cut all the rails for under the windows. We had a lot of windows so I set up a jig so we could cut the rails to the right height very quickly. This worked really well and I did the same thing for cutting the foam. Friday started out slow but we made a decent amount of progress. </p>
<p>I was paying someone hourly that had some experience for this job, but he failed to show up on Saturday. Fortunately I was in the groove after he got us started on friday. We had 6 people working for most of the day and we really moved along. By the end of the day we were about half done with the upstairs walls!&nbsp; I was very happy about that. After talking to TF they said we should expect to need about 7 days to get the walls up so we were way ahead of schedule. <br></p>
<p>I had been watching the weather and I knew we had a cold front do to move through on Sunday.&nbsp; I called most of the help off and decided to just see what we could get done in the morning on Sunday. I didn't want to get any of the saws out. The rain was supposed to get there around 10. When we got out there around 7 '' Bob" showed up to take a look. He said he would run the pump hose again but his last day in town would be Wednesday. I was planning on pouring the following Monday so we were back to crunch time. I called in another hourly worker for Monday to help keep us supplied. The rest of Sunday was spent setting the corners and bracing. It is a time consuming process but the only tool you need is an impact driver (or drill). So we got the other 2 corners up and we knew the front was almost there. I was cleaning up the tools and strapping down the foam when I heard it moving in. Looking to the west I saw the trees about 500 yards away start to blow violently. The gust picked up what had to have been millions of leaves and blew them straight up and towards us. It looked like bats or something. It was truly incredible. The sky was completely filled. When the gust got to us the temperature dropped 20 degrees and it picked up 4x8 sheet of plywood and launched it 75 feet straight towards the house. It came crashing down right on top of the bundles of foam we had just tied down and sent them hurtling through the air. Luckely there was minimal damage to them. If the plywood had hit one of our walls it could have been disastrous! We rushed the bundles of foam down to the basement and got out of there just ahead of the pouring rain.
On Monday I got out there before sunrise to start getting cords and saws out. Everything was covered in a thick frosty ice. It was muddy and frozen for the first half of the day. We made more good progress in the morning and thought pouring the next day may be a possibility. Unfortunately we had a few setbacks but we knew that Tuesday would be an easy day and it would give us plenty of time to get set up for the pour.
Tuesday we just had 2 doors and a window to go. We finished that up and got the planks up on the braces. I also got all the pass throughs for the electrical and plumbing in. I also had a company come out and pour the garage short walls.
Unfortunately I couldn't take off any more time this week so it was poured without my assistance. Everything went well except we ended up with a whole extra truck of concrete. That was a 700 dollar mistake. Now that the ICF walls are done I can breathe a little easier.