Post Holes Are Done. . .

Yesterday, my friend from work showed up right on schedule with his Kubota tractor.  He had a 12" auger attached to the PTO on his tractor.  His tool made quick work of the nine holes that had to be bored.  Even so, we still had several hours of cleanup to do as we had to enlarge the diameter of the holes to 14" to meet the town's requirements and clean out the bottom of the hole.  While the auger goes down over 3', there is quite a bit of dirt left on the bottom of the hole that needed to be removed.  As we have clay soil here, this turned out to be more work than I was expecting.  Thankfully, my son was there to help out!  It's funny that by the end of Sunday night cleaning out the holes, I was pretty spent.  My 13 year old boy however went to go play basketball with the neighborhood boys after we were done.

On the last deck I built I had rented a two man hand held auger to dig holes in clay.  The clay won.  Having the tractor saved at least a day of hand digging (and my back).

After we had the holes cleaned out, we stuck the sonotubes in the holes.  Several of the holes were slightly skewed, so trimming the tubes was necessary to make them level.  I marked them with my laser level sitting inside the holes, then cut them level with my saber saw. 

Monday morning the town building inspector came by, stuck a ruler in each of the holes, and gave us the green light.  The concrete truck came an hour later.  When I did a price comparison between buying bags of concrete and renting a mixer versus having a metered concrete truck delver the concrete, the price for the truck was slightly less.  The convenience of not having to hump bags of concrete and mix it was a huge timesaver.

My wife and son got into the action.  I poured the concrete from the wheelbarrow, my son would hoe it into the hole, and my wife would get rid of any air pockets with a piece of rebar.  I used 8" x 1/2" anchor bolts set into the concrete, which I temporarily attached to some scrap wood so they would sit at the right height.  

All in all, it took just over half an hour to fill the nine holes using 1 1/4 yards of concrete.  After getting the posts done, I attached the joist hangars to the ledger board.

The rest of this week is pretty busy and I won't be able to work the deck again until this weekend.  Until then, we'll watch the concrete dry. . .