Structural steel being installed

Finally after a long wait the structural steel is being installed. Richard Shouli and the crew from AMX Steel is here to install the steel columns and beams that provides the structural support for this house.

Space is very tight at this site and the crane barely have enough space to work. In fact the crew brought a scissor lift but it wasn’t able to fit through the 7′ drive way.

They unloaded the steel columns and beams using the crane.

And then they just the crane to life the column into place before using the nuts to secure it to the base. Here’s a video of the crew secure one of the columns.

And here we are with all eight columns secured in place.

Just as I thought we are doing well, problem strikes. I got a call in the afternoon and it seems one of the measurement is wrong. One of the spans in the middle which has always been 21′-10″ on my drawings was actually shown as 21′-0″ on the shop drawings that the engineer has sent to the shop. Even though the engineer typically send shop drawings only to the fabricator, but I did actually asked for the engineer’s shop drawing. And so I opened the file and take a look, and lo and behold, it is marked as 21’0″ on the drawing. So now the beams that was fabricated for me is 10″ too short. Longer beams, you can cut it down, really short beams, you can weld two pieces together. This one being 10″ shorter? Well looks like they have to fabricate new beams. There are a total of 6 beams that had the wrong lenght. So unfortunately this project is again delayed.

The crew started to work early today around 9am and left around 4:30pm. I have 8 columns installed and 2 beams that goes across the basement installed. They told me they will continue to work on the rest of the parts while the shop fabricates the new beams for the ones that had the wrong measurement. Here’s a time-lapsed video of the day.