Behind the Build: foundation pour week

Five concrete trucks. Three hours of light. A bathhouse slab, two RV pads, and the corner of the pickleball courts. The week the park stopped being a property and started being a campground.

This is Doug. Two months ago we were a piece of property with a survey stake and a plan. This week, the bathhouse slab came up. So did the first two RV pads, and the corner of the pickleball court. We're not a property anymore. We're a campground.

The plan vs. the reality

We had five trucks scheduled. The plan was: bathhouse slab at 6am, RV pads at 9am, pickleball corner at noon, finish by 3pm before the afternoon storms.

Reality: the first truck got stuck on the access road. The second truck was twenty minutes late. By the time we were pouring the bathhouse, we'd lost an hour and the noon storm was visible on the radar. We poured the pickleball corner from 1pm to 2:15pm, with thunder in the distance, and then ran for the trucks the second the first drops hit.

Everything came out clean. The bathhouse slab is square. The pads are level. The pickleball corner cured for 28 days under a tarp and is ready for asphalt next month.

What I learned this week

Concrete trucks need a real path

I'd built a rough construction road thinking it was fine. It wasn't fine. The first truck (32,000 lbs loaded) bottomed out on a soft spot we hadn't seen. Pulled it out with the dozer. Spent the next two days putting down a real base — six inches of gravel compacted twice — before the second pour. Lesson: build for the heaviest equipment, not the average.

Pour-day weather is a coin flip in June

The NWS Wilmington forecast said 30% chance of storms after 3pm. We started before 6am and finished at 2:15pm — and the storm hit at 2:25pm. We were lucky. Next month's pour, I'm scheduling for the first half of June, not the last week. Tropical-influence weeks are unforgiving.

The bathhouse is the heart of the park

Seeing the slab go down felt like more than just a concrete pour. The bathhouse is the most-used building in any campground — every family hits it twice a day. We over-built this slab on purpose: thicker reinforcement, better drainage, a roof structure that's designed for 130 mph winds (the Wilmington coast gets named storms about every other year). It's going to outlive me. That's the goal.

What's next

• Late June: bathhouse framing starts. We'll have a roof by mid-July.
• July: the next 12 RV pad pours. Plus the camp store foundation.
• August: pickleball asphalt. Playground footings. Pool excavation begins.
• September: hookup trenching. The big infrastructure month.

The slab photo

Below is the bathhouse slab. The metal lines are the conduit for the plumbing. The dark circles are where the toilets will sit. The dark spot in the corner is where we left a fingerprint by accident (Doug's, embarrassingly). We're leaving it.

This is going to be a real campground in eight months. From this week on, every photo is going to look more like a park and less like a property. Subscribe to the newsletter if you want the next month's update — it's the easiest way to get the construction story without me having to remember to text anyone.

See you next month.

— Doug