Looking for Construction Surveying Resources

I always liked this book. I felt like it was very concise and easy to understand. I don't have it in front of me to see if it has the exact topic you're looking for but I would recommend it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5987472-construction-surveying-and-layout

Merry Christmas!

Wesley Crawford has written a book on construction layout techniques. I purchased an older edition at the ACSM conference when it was in Nashville. It was new, but the next edition has just been released that month, and I picked it up for about $20. It has a good bit of information in it. "Construction Surveying and Layout, Second Edition" is the title of my copy.

There are some other titles out there. Good luck.

The guys mention a very good resources book, here's the link:

Construction surveying and layout

My advice is to talk to those who actually build what you lay out. Then you know what they want, then using the cited texts in this thread, you can lay it out properly. You need to think like the concrete guy, excavator, or road builder in order to give them the information they can use.

carriage house??

> (as I'm planning a small carriage house project next spring)

Would that be what most of us call a garage? 🙂

carriage house??

> > (as I'm planning a small carriage house project next spring)
>
> Would that be what most of us call a garage? 🙂

LOL. No, It's actually a small carriage house looking small house...16'x 16', for vacation rental to romantically inclined couples (not that that has the least to do with the challenge)...

It would be on a gentle slope, next to a pond, and there's a lot of water coming down the hill, so I want to be UBER careful about grades, drainage, etc. and pitching the basement slab to drain etc.

Joe the Surveyor's advice is excellent, and I've been doing that. My excavator guy is super experienced, knowledgeable, and very helpful, so I've been relying on him a good deal. I haven't found a concrete guy around here yet that comes with a stellar reputation, so I'd like to be "armed with knowledge" as much as possible before they start pumping the crete.

I guess my thinking has been forever "seared" by the memory of a good friend whose house I helped build...Concrete guy came, set forms, poured, pulled the forms and left...

Following week I stopped by and asked: "where's the basement walkout stair?"

He looked at me strangely. It took a week with hammer drill, concrete saw and jack hammer, not to mention having to call back the concrete guys to form and pour the stair well. My carpal tunnel syndrome's never been the same since.

Never again!

carriage house??

There are a LOT of dirt work guys out there who run by the seat of their pants, and even if you do give them the proper offset stakes and benchmarks, they still manage to screw it up. Heck... most don't know how to properly deal with offset stakes, and if they don't... they call back and complain that the crew chief didn't stake the foundation.

Ask what the builder wants, and what he knows how to handle. the most perfectly set out offset stakes could become totally useless if he doesn't know how to transfer them back into the hole.

>
> It would be on a gentle slope, next to a pond, and there's a lot of water coming down the hill, so I want to be UBER careful about grades, drainage, etc. and pitching the basement slab to drain etc.

what do you mean by "pitching the basement slab"? is is common place to add cross slope on a residential basement floor where you are?

carriage house??

> what do you mean by "pitching the basement slab"? is it common place to add cross slope on a residential basement floor where you are?

I asked my excavator guy that very question. He said most of the time the concrete guys put floor drains in, and claim that the floor is pitched for drainage. But he says he's never seen a case where once filled with rainwater or whatever, the water has ever gone to the drain, lol. I just thought that if I were knowledgeable enough to know how it's properly done, and knewhow to check with my total station and or a Philadelphia ride, I would at least be able to confirm that it's been prepared properly. But right now, what I don't know far exceeds what I do know about the subject.

They must have to do this when they build breweries or whatever, no?

carriage house??

If you are simply talking about setting in a floor drain and have everywhere in the basement slope towards it, I have done this when I worked construction over 30 years ago.
This was just a 15'x15' or so extension to an auto parts store for a machine shop. They wanted a center drain. A simple 1 or 2 inch drop from the forms to the drain edge was all that was called for. All we did was build our forms like usual, then pulled strings from the centers of each side to its opposite side.
Then we rough formed around the drain to get it down to the 1 or inch drop.
We it came time to pour, we just poured like usual excepts for that we couldn't use our usual floats or screeding techniques since the floor was no where close to even.
We took a long 2x4 and used it for a screed going from the drain out to the forms in a radial manner.
We just did the floor and didn't build the extension. This was my usual parts store so I asked the guys one day after their project was done how our floor worked out for them. They said you could soak the entire floor and leave it for an hour and it would be dry as a bone.
That was good to hear since none of us had ever done an irregular surface like that.

Good luck.
E

Great ideas

> If you are simply talking about setting in a floor drain and have everywhere in the basement slope towards it, I have done this when I worked construction over 30 years ago.

Thanks very much. That part may not be as hard as I might have imagined.

Thanks also to the others on the references. I have the third edition of the Wesley Crawford book on the way.

carriage house??

that type of floor drain is pretty much illegal here now. NHDES requires so much permit paperwork and annual monitoring that most new construction simply foregoes any floor drains.