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Hi, my name is Eric Alarid, with Tilson Homes, and as part of the fourth generation of the Tilson family, I'm really honored and proud to bring you some of the things that we do behind the scenes to help ensure that your home is the highest quality possible. Let's go have a look.

By far, without question, the most important facet of your home is the foundation, and we take that part very seriously. Before we even think about what kind of foundation is going to be designed for it, an engineer comes out and does what's known as a geotechnical investigation. And they give us this geotechnical investigation stamped by the engineer, and then the foundation engineer takes this information and designs a foundation specific to the soil on your land so that we can ensure that you have the highest quality possible foundation for your specific piece of property. All right, we're out here in New Waverly, Texas, placing a slab for a model home of ours in Texas Grand Ranch. So one of the most important parts before you place the concrete is making sure you've got a vapor barrier between the ground, which has moisture, and the slab, which also has moisture but at a different level. So you want to make sure that the moisture doesn't transfer back and forth, and we do that with this black polyethylene plastic.

We wanted to show you guys what goes on behind the scenes, particularly during the placing of concrete. We've got a lot going on behind me, as you can see. We've got trucks from the ready mix company that are pouring concrete into the pump truck, it's going up through a boom and then coming down into the slab. They're doing that so that we can be sure that the concrete is placed well down into these beams.

So the engineer designs how deep and how wide these beams need to be on these homes and exactly how far apart they need to be placed. And then the pump truck is back here, placing the concrete down into the beam. In addition to the beam width and depth that the engineer designs, the engineer also designed exactly how many of these blue cables that you're seeing and what distance apart they're going to be. This house has been designed with a post tension foundation.

It takes a full 28 days for all kinds of concrete to cure, and then during that time, about 10 to 14 days in, the post tension company is going to come back out here, all of these cables that are going each direction are coated in axle grease. And they're going to tighten these cables going both directions to somewhere between 29,000 and 31,000 PSI. And what that's doing is taking advantage of the compression strength of concrete coupled with the tensile strength of the steel to ensure really high quality foundation for you.

I really hope what you see has been beneficial, and while the finishes of the home are really important, we hope that you've been able to tell that what goes on behind the scenes is really where the quality begins. And that's what we do every day, all across the state of Texas for all of our customers. We hope to one day make you apart of the Tilson family.