On-site Visit

In Introduction to Building Construction II last Tuesday, I was given the task of visiting a nearby construction site in order to observe activities being carried out.

So, I visited the New Residence Dormitory room that's currently being build on-campus next to Cochrane Hall. It seemed like a rather slow day for today, but I still managed to pick-up on a few things. (On the right) A picture of one of the sides where masonry workers are fitting masonry onto the walls. Building's on-campus use a unique limestone from a quarry owned by Virginia Tech called "Hokie Stone." Unfortunately from this view you can't see the masonry workers due to the exterior covering to protect their work from weather elements, but the noise from chiseling definitely signaled that work was being done. Piles of limestone could be found throughout the site as workers on ground level used hand chisels to give the stone a basic shape to work with. Then, when the stone reached it's destination on the upper levels of scaffolding, then workers further shaped it to fit their needs. The masonry is put in place using a mortar made out of Portland cement and aggregates mixed on-site using an industrial mixer.

(To the left) A gradall telehandler is being used by a crew to lift loads of Hokie Stone (limestone used on on-campus buildings) to masonry workers on the upper levels of the scaffolding. Since the New Residence dorm is multiple stories, boom lifts like this one have to be used to transport masonry stone from ground level to where it is needed. Current models of Gradall telehandlers can be seen here as well as their specs:

http://www.goldcoasthilift.com/scissor_lifts_equipment/gradall_544d.html

(To the right) A worker is using a hand operated sander to provide a smooth, leveled finish to some concrete supports. Worker was on ground level finishing one of the side entrances to the dormitory.

(To the left) A cross section of the exterior wall of the dorm is provided on-site. The exterior surface is made with Hokie stone (limestone), which is what the masonry workers were, shown earlier, moving and fitting into place. Then, on the interior, is basic concrete masonry units that were put in earlier last year. Masonry walls have a significant fire safety advantage, which is always considered on college campuses.

Assembly and Unit Cost Estimating (Quantifying Concrete)

In Introduction to Building Construction II, we were tasked with quantifying concrete for a set of blueprints given to us in class of a Research and Development facility. Unfortunately for us,
the size of the numbers on the printed "prints" were not as large as we would have like them to be. But I guess it's only appropriate because the on-site prints sometimes can be no different. So, I started quantifying the site using a traditional quantify sheet and a few pieces of scratch paper. The research and development facility was your average square, so quantifying it at times proved to be more of a challenge than I had expected. There were multiple things to quantify, including but not limited to: interior and exterior walls, 4" slabs, 6" slabs, a thickened slab, stairs, foundations, rebar, vapor barriers, saw cuts, and a continuous wall footing. Once I had quantified all the these things and recorded them on the quantifying sheet, I used CostWorks located on RSmeans.com.

CostWorks is an online data base that you can subscribe to. We were required to in order to use it for various in-class projects. It's a substantially large data base that includes unit prices and assembly prices; both of which we had to do for this project. So, I basically wondered the data for anything and everything related to things on the quantifying sheet, and I added them. Once that was done, I imported it to excel, and I produced an assembly and unit cost estimate (pictures below).

Unit Cost Estimate (Excel)












Assembly Estimate (Excel)

Example of Wall Assembly

Link to site:

http://www.masonrymagazine.com/10-07/practices.html

Materials:
-Termination Bar
-Thermoplastic flashing
-Concrete Block
-Brick
-Drip plate
-Mortar Dropping collection device

Masonry and Brick are high energy efficient materials for construction of a wall assembly. And both also have a high recycle value. This wall assembly includes a wire reinforcement and anchoring system to increase the longevity of the wall.

Attendance in Class 2/24

Tuesday 2/24/09 I attended class.