Category: Pat ‘n’ Steph

The title of the post is the pile driving company.  Here’s the pile driving beast above.  The pile driving machine is on the right, and some kind of control unit is on the left.  These are powered by a diesel generator, which you see below.

The reason the generator is in the air, and it looks like the middle of the night, is because one of my neighbors complained to the city I was repairing my foundation!  Like I had a choice of course.  She complained about the disruption to the neighborhood by the noise and presence of heavy equipment on the street.  This in turn led the city to come out with a fine tooth comb, go through all of my permits, and demand I follow all the rules to a tee.

This meant at the crack of dawn the pile driving company had to move their equipment from one side of the street to the other, and the placement of the equipment was measured to the centimeter.  To satisfy my neighbor they had to place pieces of wood under their equipment, so the sidewalk wouldn’t be damaged, even though it had been on the sidewalk for two days by then already.

It also means instead of taking 4 days as originally planned it’ll now probably take 6 and span a weekend, meaning we all have to suffer from the disruption all that much more.

My neighbor by the way is Atelier Roos Sieraden, in Amsterdam.

Hanging from the pile driver is a large weight.  It was a little hard not to be in the way when I took these pictures, and the space was very tight, so these pictures aren’t very good.  Check out the guy’s mohawk!

This pile driver uses what they call the ‘Vibration-Free System’.  It’s a little bit of a lie that it’s totally vibration-free, but it’s pretty close.

This seems to be part of the problem with Roos Sieraden complaining to the city, as she was probably expecting the whole neighborhood to be shaking as it did during the recent foundation work by my other neighbors, but that’s just not the case.  It was probably a total loss-of-face for her to have complained so bitterly about vibrations that never occurred, that it just infuriated her that much more into complaining louder.

It’s actually kind of interesting because my other neighbor had his foundation done about a year ago by this same company, but it seems the technology and methods have changed since then meaning it’s a lot more quiet with fewer vibrations.

They are driving piles as I type this in the room directly below me, and it’s no problem.  There’s a bit of noise and welding smoke, but hardly any vibrations.

As I understand, the piles are both driven from within the ground by this heavy weight, as well as sometimes from the top.  The piles themselves are hollow tubes, that are to be later filled with cement.  These metal pipes are in sections about 2 meters long, just about the clearance of the ceiling, and are welded to each other.

You can see the guy here fitting a new section of pipe over the driving weight.

Above is more of a distance shot.  You can see the already driven pile on the floor to the right.

Here above you can see their collection of driving weights, together with an already driven pile in the middle.

So far I’m really happy with this company!  They are really good natured, and seem to enjoy what they do.  They’ve been really patient when it comes to my difficult neighbors.  They also seem very skilled, which is very nice as it’s not uncommon with this kind of work to have the machines run by someone 25 years old with no previous experience.  Of course I don’t have the bill yet…

The pile driving for our new foundation starts tomorrow.  In the last few weeks they’ve been preparing by finishing the demolition of the old interior walls, putting up support structures like in the picture below and cutting holes in the concrete floor.

I’ve posted before a number of times about this foundation repair that’s been dragging out for years now.

The picture below is another example in a series of skeletons in the closet the contractor found.  In my last post I talked about the center load bearing wall that was listing, and this is the wall beyond that one.  This wall is not only listing, but it’s buckling too.  You can see it has a definite concave shape with respect to the wooden supports.  Since it’s also an outer wall, it can’t just be removed like the other load bearing wall, so after the foundation repair I will build a new wall in front of this one, and fill the space between the two walls with concrete, in order to harden the wall and provide enough support for the house.

In the bottom of the picture you can see some of the holes that have been cut into the concrete floor.

Here’s another example of the wall supports they are using to stabilize the house for the pile driving and foundation repair.  The support will change in the course of the work.  Once the piles are in place, they will be more stable than the house, so the support structure will change in order to take advantage of this extra support.  Notice how they had to support the window here too?  This whole setup seems a little dodgy to me, but in fact it represents weeks of work by the contractor and construction engineer, and was approved by the city as part of my building permit.  It’s all been very carefully mathematically calculated and worked out.

I had to include this picture below, because there is so much going on.  The ceiling beam that was burned by the flu (I mentioned this in my previous post) was cut away to make space for the support on the left.  On the wall you see a number of generations of brick work, starting with the 350 year old original wall.  The ceiling beams are different heights here, and you see the intersecting steel beams.

This wall below was another skeleton, and was the source of quite some consternation for the contractor.  This is supposed to be a load bearing wall, and is very important for the support of the house.  The problem is at some point someone took it out and replaced it with a non-load bearing wall.  In other words the cinder blocks you see are not sufficient to support the house.

Well my house hasn’t collapsed yet.  The contractor and building engineer know how to deal with a load bearing wall, even one that’s in bad shape.  They know what to do when a wall is not load bearing.  The problem is what to do when a wall is supposed to be load bearing, but isn’t…

This wall will be replaced by a steel support beam.

Of course the workers have a chance to get in on the action too.  This is what’s left of my utility cabinet and electric meter after the demolition work.  When you need to have electricity for music, there’s always a place and time for a little creative electrical wiring…

Holes need to be cut in the concrete floor, instead of just removing it, because the pile driving machinery has to have a hard surface to work on.  This is what the holes looked like right after they cut them.

My house sits right about at sea level, and you can see the water level in this hole.

My house is actually made op of two houses joined together by breaking through the middle wall.  You can tell the previous owners had different ideas on how to build a floor.  On one side there was nothing but sand under the concrete floor.

On the other side, they found another concrete floor under the first one, and had to use a special drill to go through the second floor.  Under the second concrete floor was a wooden floor…

The picture below is what it looked like after they finished drilling (together with my shoe).