A New Year

We wish you a Prosperous, Healthy and Joyous 2013

We are starting a new year at the project site, but essentially picking up where we left off. We meet at the site for a project progress meeting every other week. The last meeting was December 20, 2012 and the next meeting will be January 10, 2013 with a little interruption due to the holidays. The Contractor maps out a 3 week look ahead to share the anticipated construction activities that will occur in the coming weeks. Construction schedules are always a work in progress as any number of things can crop us that either accelerate or delay the schedule. The 3 week look ahead shared on December 20 is shown below.  Recent snow and ice have pushed some activities off by about a week.

You can see on the schedule that the structural steel was planned for delivered on December 27/28. That didn’t happen due to the weather, so it will likely be delivered this week. All the steel for the project is going to be delivered in one batch. We’ll see where the Contractor plans on staging this material. Along with the steel, the steel erector will be showing up on the site with crane for placing the steel. We’ll have some dialogue with the erector to see what their strategy is for working the site.

The 3 week look ahead has 13 key activities that will be happening at the site and includes the completion of a lot of the cast-in-concrete work including slabs, foundations, the shear walls and elevator shaft. From the progress photos below, you will see that there is ongoing construction activity on the shear walls. The importance and purpose of the shear walls was discussed in the post “Collateral Forces.”

The following floor plan is provided for orientation and is keyed to the recent photos so that you can see where the elements (shear walls, elevator shaft, etc.) are located in plan and the directions from which the photos were taken.

Other current activities include under slab plumbing and electrical along with waterproofing of the cast-in-place walls that are being back filled with earth. I’ll walk through the installation of those elements in upcoming posts. The structural steel erection will be interesting to experience; it happens quickly and changes the perspective of the site dramatically.