Happy 30th Birthday Luke

Happy Birthday Luke! Don't burn down the house with all those candles. According to Stone, you are twenty-ten.

I planned a surprise party for Luke. My friend Tracy watched the boys while Luke and I went out to eat. We ate at Dickey's Barbeque Pit. While we were gone, the other guests arrived and surprised Luke when we got home. I think maybe he knew what was going on, but of well. It was fun anyway. Then we watched the Bachelorette with our friends Catherine and Wes. I'm sure that is just what the guys wanted to do.

These pictures are from Father's Day.

Rained Out

For a lack of anything else to post about, I moved from the office helping in the Estimating department to a new project. I know some of you might not want to read about my work, so if that is you,stop reading now. We are the General Contractor on a Student Housing Complex near Denver University. I moved out here mid-May to help prepare for the job and almost 2 weeks ago we got the full notice to proceed. Since then we have been moving a lot of dirt and putting up our SOE (Support of Excavation) Wall.


Along the back of the picture you can see the wall with the holes spaced out about every 6 feet. That is the SOE wall. That has chain link reinforcement in it with rebar and is all tied together. They shoot a thin concrete mix we call shotcrete onto the wall 5" thick and after that sets up the next day they shoot in soil nails about 15-20 feet into the wall to hold back the wall and keep it from caving in. There is a concrete alley behind that fence with traffic.


Above you can see the crew on the right starting to drill in the Soil Nails. They are the only ones working on the site today because of the rain. It's a good thing they are here too because half of their crew was pulled to go to another job so to keep up with the schedule they cannot miss a day. Below you can see our office trailers being assembled. Since teh project is scheduled to go to mid-summer 2009, we are setting up a good office. This is a lot across the street we were able to secure after another project finished nearby. They were using it for their office trailers and allowed us to take over the lease. The project is directly across the street and since the apartment takes up the entire lot, it was a very convenient.


We have 2 interns for the summer from CSU and CU. I have been able to have them here helping me with layout and a lot of the trivial things so that I can focus my time a little better on the big things and learning as much as I can from my new superintendent. Each superintendent does things their own way. All 3 have been very unique in their approach. My new one, Tom, is very kick-back and even-tempered. We get along well and I like the fact that he is very simple in his approach. I am getting better at using AutoCad to draw our plans and is has been a very valuable tool.