In today's house building installment my son and I went up for a late lunch break once again for about 1 hour. It was upper 20sF or maybe 30F. Cloudy but the sun did shine through for a short while which warmed my back... As I said before, once you get out there and are busy it's not cold. The hard part is opening the garage and getting in the car to get there.
Anyway, my son worked on cleaning out the lego tops of dirt and gravel, and concrete, and a little snow and he put another long foam block on next to the corner we did yesterday. He had to cut it short since it ended on a seam. (This section of wall is relatively short and you'll always have a seam in the middle where the two wall pieces join (you start in opposite corners and work to the middle and that is where the seam is since your wall is never exactly the right length to just use the wall pieces without a seam).
Just a short ways to the right of that where the garage starts, the foam was only one sided so that we had an open area to lay the pre-stressed suspended slab down. Now we need to add the second side back in so we can build up. Because we haven't been able to actually pour the slab yet (weather etc) I have to leave room underneath it for the slab concrete to go over the edge and fill up the gaps between the pre-stressed and the walls. So I took some scrap and cut it to length and height (about 3 - 3 1/2" above the pre-stressed) and zip tied the two pieces together. Because both sides originall were a normal two sided piece of foam wall they had the plastic web pieces that we had cut to separate the halves. So we zip tied thhose cut webs back together. I left one bit of the webbing longer on one end as a foot so that it woud support itself on the pre-stressed slab giving teh 3 or 3 1/2" height. I tried to leave a plastic foot from the web on both ends but ended up cutting too deeply into the plastic when I was cutting to height so only one end has the plastic foot for height. The two pieces you see stuck on top, in the photo below, are just scrap we temporarily stuck on to give us our width so that the two halves put back together are the right height. Tomorrow well put steel straightener ladder piece in and then a whole 8' long block on top which will help hold the smaller piece I added in place as well... (The above probably makes no sense without a lot of detailed pics but I just have the one pic -- suffice it to say we have to build up the second half all the way around the garage inner wall where we had only one sided foam so far. We'll do that this weekend. This was the test and to allow us to finish the wall we were working on...
By adding the second side now, leaving about 3- 31/2" of space underneath it for the concrete to flow when we do pour the garage slab, we can get the walls done without having to wait for the pour first, which saves a bunch of time as the walls we can do in the cold and snow. It should also help hold it in place for when we pour the wall since the slab will be 4"-6" thick (depending on where in the garage) so this wall piece we're adding will be partially embedded in the slab, holding it in place for later vertical wall pour.
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Totally unrelated, here is a pic I took on Monday when we had a nice sunny day. There were clouds on the east side of the valley up around the mountains. Unfortunately we had an inversion, so the darker color you see in the clouds below the top is actually polluted cloud/air mixture (basically smog). When it is cold and sunny in the winter, being in a valley, we get inversions which traps pollution. Basically a big mass of cold air is sitting on top of the warmer air in the valley, preventing it from going up and dispersing the pollution. When we have inevrsion there are burn bans for fireplaces etc and they tell people to avoid unnecessary driving. Of course, everyone thinks their driving is necessary
We live on the west bench (where the mountains of the west side of the valley are no where near as tall as the east) and we tend to not get as much of the bad air as the middle of the valley or the more crowded east side.
You know we're talking about a $5K motorhome windscreen right?
thehill.com
is supposed to stay on the OUTSIDE of the basement, not the inside. Err no?? 
. Even if it snows, we'll be working at lunch tomorrow and alk day Saturday with my BIL. Only blizzard white out conditions will stop us...
