Are We Making Progress Yet?

The forms were removed from the foundation walls and Keith quickly found that one of the walls was shifted 1-1/2 inches from where it should have been located. It will be a pain for the concrete company to cut off the excess concrete so we can finish the outside the way it is supposed to be. If you look at the picture below, you can see in the circle that the near wall (bottom arrow) doesn't exactly line up with the far wall (upper arrow).
Foundation wall out of alignment
Gravel was "shot" into the basement. I hadn't understood the term "shoot the gravel" until I was there and saw that the gravel truck has a long conveyor belt that literally shoots the gravel into the corners of the basement. The lighting isn't great, but if you look carefully, you can see the gravel against the foundation wall. I've marked it with an arrow to make it easier to find.
Shooting the gravel

Today, Nov 15, 2017,was the day to set the steel beams and basement columns.
The steel is set
A 40 Ton crane made the steel installation easy
Of course, there was a problem. The steel company didn't supply a beam stretcher with the delivery, so we couldn't get one of the beams to fit. It was three feet too short! All the paperwork was correct, so the steel company's shop made the error.

The beam is short - about 3 feet too short!
The problem with the short beam is that this is the heaviest beam, at about 1500 lb. We may have to set it by hand, using a big crew to make lifting it safe for everyone. I certainly hope that we get all the mistakes out early, so that the shell goes up smoothly.
Lundberg will make some progress today by putting the sill plate on everything except for the missing beam.

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