With just two weekends left before our scheduled shotcrete date, Jeff and I were very busy.  We had hoped to finish off the North entrance and thus be done with all the forming but we fell a bit short of that goal..  The long Labor Day weekend is coming up so we are confident that we can get everything ready in time.

One of the challenges was joining the North entrance arch with the main structure.  There are no adjoining  steel I-beams to run the forms from.   I attached a guide to the rebar to run a hot knife foam cutter. This made a fairly clean cut where the two arches meet.

The North entrance is a much tighter radius arch than the rest of the house. While the one inch foam boards are fairly flexible, it was difficult getting them to curve around the arch without cracking.  We ended up putting strips of Duct Tape on the back sides to reinforce them.

We also spent some time running conduit through the foam where they needed to come in through the shell.  We used a different type of hot knife that was basically a stiff wire on a wand, perfect for making small round holes in the foam.

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The Scotch Broom is gone!  The brush on the edge of our hill had been getting a bit out of hand and was starting to block the view.

Jeff spent a whole day clearing  it.

Now, not only do we have a wonderful vista view down to the slough and river, but from below you can really see the form of our house take shape

Getting the foam forms to fit into the angular arch segments has been the most challenging but we are progressing well.  On Sunday, we met with the contractor who will be spraying the shotcrete shell.  We have set a date for the big event for September 8 – 9 with a back-up date that following week.

We only had one full day to work together on the house this weekend but Jeff spent Friday and Saturday tying lath boards to hold in the foam forms.  Sunday was very productive.

Getting the foam to fit around the central octagon was a bit of a challenge for me.  Geometry was not my best subject in school.

The East end is pretty much done and we finished about half of the West end.

This is starting to look like the computer generated graphic version of our house.