Day 7 - Nudura Bambura

 

We're back. This sucker needs an 8ft wall by Thursday. We're going up today. Way up.

You might be thinking, "Matt, what is this baby blue garbage I'm looking at? I've never seen this before." First of all, woah. That's uncalled for. Second, these are your ICFs, otherwise known as insulated concrete forms. The next question is, "Why?" Excellent question, recently-relaxed reader. When you are building concrete walls, you need to frame the walls, pour the concrete, remove the framing, add a layer of insulating foam, add lumber for your inner wall, blah blah blah. I might have made up a step or missed one or mixed a few up. I don't know, I'm still new here. Day 7, see? The bottom line is that there are a lot of steps that take a lot of time when you are talking about the traditional concrete wall building methods. With ICFs, there are two steps: stack the blocks, and pour the concrete. Done. The forms provide framing, insulation, a surface to nail/screw to, everything. They even make you breakfast in the morning. Just kidding, but that would be nice. Hint hint, Nudura. Nudura is the ICF manufacturer. Check them out! The forms are more costly upfront, but the time and hassle they save you down the road pays you back with dollars and peace of mind.

That's Cody on the ladder. Be careful up there, Cody! Cody is with Nudura and has been for 10 years. Cody is showing Joey how to install the staging. We need a way to securely stack an 8ft wall and pour concrete down into it, and since we are not a million feet tall, Nudura provides special staging for us. We stack the walls as high as we can, set the staging, then stack the rest.

We made a couple more progressions with the forms, but I forgot to take pictures. We were getting rained on since lunch time, and it was just one of those days where you want to make like a baby and head out. More updates to come tomorrow, and more rain!