Blaze
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Yeah the issue with the wall was more complicated than we thought it would be, never imagined something simple like that could cause so many headaches. When we first had the concrete guys look at it, they thought we could get it all with 8" blocks, , at 4-6' high, no big deal. Then we got the specs back from the engineer....
They wanted to see a wall with 8' wide footings, 8' tall, 80' long, with 3/4" rebar lattice work all throughout, and a drain system behind it. Basically increased the amount of cement we would have to pour by about 1,000%, and would cost almost as much as the greenhouse itself.
The problem is that with the Conelys we would have needed to have the a lot of space between the north wall of the building and the bank it was against. About a 6' space between the wall and the structure for airflow is needed and so we could get back their to build and maintain it, then we would have needed to cut about another 12' back into the bank to get the 8' wide wall and space behind it to work and to instal the drain. We only have 35' of flat space to work with until the north slope turns into an extremely steep, solid rock hill - no way we could get the almost 20' extra width needed.
With the Gro-Tech it looks like we should be able to mount it on a 3' perimeter foundation, which gets us 6' farther away from that north bank since we won't need that extra space between the bank and the building, and the foundation itself will act as the retaining wall. At that point, the wall/foundation only needs to be about 2' high to hold the dirt back which shouldn't even require engineering anymore and gets us back to a reasonable amount of concrete work. Hopefully it will work out, the whole process has been extremely frustrating, I can see why so many people just build them without permits.
They wanted to see a wall with 8' wide footings, 8' tall, 80' long, with 3/4" rebar lattice work all throughout, and a drain system behind it. Basically increased the amount of cement we would have to pour by about 1,000%, and would cost almost as much as the greenhouse itself.
The problem is that with the Conelys we would have needed to have the a lot of space between the north wall of the building and the bank it was against. About a 6' space between the wall and the structure for airflow is needed and so we could get back their to build and maintain it, then we would have needed to cut about another 12' back into the bank to get the 8' wide wall and space behind it to work and to instal the drain. We only have 35' of flat space to work with until the north slope turns into an extremely steep, solid rock hill - no way we could get the almost 20' extra width needed.
With the Gro-Tech it looks like we should be able to mount it on a 3' perimeter foundation, which gets us 6' farther away from that north bank since we won't need that extra space between the bank and the building, and the foundation itself will act as the retaining wall. At that point, the wall/foundation only needs to be about 2' high to hold the dirt back which shouldn't even require engineering anymore and gets us back to a reasonable amount of concrete work. Hopefully it will work out, the whole process has been extremely frustrating, I can see why so many people just build them without permits.