Well, it has begun! I will finally be telling my friends about this site so they can follow along. I also created a parallel Facebook page for those friends and family who always stay in Facebook. It also lets me have this cool “like” button on the right hand side of the screen. Since I plan to record and upload videos, I also started a channel for “Simon@HomeInTheEarth.com” on Youtube. I uploaded my first video here…
Excavation, day 1
Excavation, day 1
We still have not closed on our loan, we don’t even have a closing date (we have had 3, but currently don’t have any). On the other hand, construction season is passing us by, so we decided to go ahead with the excavation.
We ended up going with Roe Brothers Excavation. I liked them personally, I liked that they met with me when they said they would and they got me a quote like they said they would. I also really liked the quote. I liked it so much, I was a bit concerned about what I would discover from the references. I was quite relieved when all the references came back very positive. I asked each reference when Roe Brothers had worked for them and they all said, “just a few weeks ago…” It actually took me a week to getting around to calling them, so that is a really good sign that they weren’t cherry picking their references.
Roe Brothers showed up right on time, actually, I got Marty, not sure if he is a brother or a nephew. I’ll ask him next time I get a chance. First, Sherri took care of the initial paperwork and payment. Then we reviewed the bulldozer plan, we discussed which area to level, how deep, and where to push the soil and dirt. They only had a bulldozer on site and said they wouldn’t actually be getting the excavator in that day. It was busy on another job, presumably with another brother? Most of the home is slab on grade, so we still needed to level the site today. But we would need to wait to excavate the basement portion until next Thursday. However, this backed up my schedule because the footings guy was scheduled for next Thursday… I called and canceled the footings, but then at the end of the day, we found out that the excavator will be available by noon tomorrow, so maybe we are back on track? I won’t call the footings contractor back until I know for sure.
On the one hand, my lot is sandy, so it was pretty easy to work with… On the other hand, there was a lot of sand to work with. There was a dip in the middle of the site. We need to go down to undisturbed earth for the footings, so we couldn’t just fill in the dip. Instead, the bulldozer had to get everything down to that lowest level. They setup a laser level at a certain height and then a device in the dozer would tell Marty if he was too high, too low, or just right. I think it took longer (and more work) than Marty was expecting, so it is a good thing that I was on a fixed bid. But Marty was good about it and went out of his way to do a great job. He even cleaned up the driveway slope at the end of the day.
While the bulldozer was busy doing his work, I was busy putting in a couple hundred feet of silt fence. I don’t expect any erosion, but it is a requirement of my “soil erosion permit” and the 60$ worth of silt fence and a few hours of manual labor are better than the $2500 fine for not putting it up. The boys helped a bit. They spent most of their lives hearing that this house was coming, so we took them out of school for the day so they could see the ground breaking. I got some pics of them helping with the silt fence, but it is on Sherri’s camera and I am too tired to upload them now. Instead, here are some fun ones I snagged with my cell phone.
My younger boy is a bit of a Ham.
They really enjoyed playing in the dirt pile during a break.
We have a Bulldozer on the property!
It is just sitting there, very peaceful. I didn’t see any broken ground, but it is still pretty significant. There was also some mystery to it because we had not actually hired anyone or setup a start date yet. I had called Roe Brothers Excavation company a few times trying to ask them when it would be a good date for them to start. I had left several voice mails and emails, but not heard back at all… I assumed they were taking the whole week off (it is a holiday weekend here in the USA).
I have heard of sending messages by bottle or with smoke rings or even, in extreme cases, with bullets, but this was a dozer message. I called them up and cleared up the miss communication. They had planned to start first thing Tuesday morning (Monday is a holiday). 
A catch… In our state, you are supposed to call “Miss Dig” before you dig. They mark all the buried wires and pipes. Sherri had already called them, but with the holiday weekend ahead, they said they might not get out there until Tuesday or Wednesday next week… There are power boxes strung along the roads, so I am pretty sure I already know what they will tell me. There are almost certainly lines buried under where the drive way will cross, but only right by the road. There shouldn’t be any lines under the home site, which is essentially in a corn field. The excavator says he only needs to go down a few inches for the driveway and the wires and gas pipes are located at least 2 ft below that.
Another catch, we haven’t actually closed on our loan yet (see the hurdles from a few days ago)… We don’t even have a closing date yet, but we are close enough that I am willing to go ahead anyway just to avoid losing more of the summer.
The weather forecast isn’t being very helpful either. They are calling for thunderstorms for most of this week. Next week, I am going to Washington state to visit Boeing (for work), so that won’t be good either… Anyway, I hope to post that we broke ground soon.
In the end, we setup a start date of Wednesday morning. ;^)
Picked Up My Building Permit…
I was only visiting the property because we were required to post a sign with our address and the permits clearly displayed. This is to help the inspectors find your lot. I picked up the “official” plans along with the permit. These need to be kept on site also, but probably not until things really get rolling.
The inspector had written notes on the plans, but fewer than I had expected. A couple were not a problem. For instance, he wants me to make sure that the ducts under my floors slope to an accessible point and to make sure that I have a good system of french drains. These were things that I planned to do, but were not spelled out clearly enough in the plans.
A few of the other notes don’t go as well with my unusual construction and I will try to talk to him about those over the next weeks.
The biggest issue was that he didn’t like my Frost Protected Shallow Footings. I sent him info on the ICC (International (building) Code Council) and ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) outlining how to properly apply this method. Hopefully he appreciates that because I planned to offset the additional cost of insulation with the reduced cost of shallower footings.
Another smaller issue was the specification of a “concrete encased electrode” in the foundation (aka Ufer ground). He probably recommended it because he could see how much rebar I already had in my foundation, and it is probably a good idea to tie my grounding system into all of that (although there have been cases when lightning strikes actually cause the moisture in the concrete to rapidly expand, crack and occasionally explode). Normally, a concrete encased electrode is a very effective grounding system and the NEC allows it to be used as your only grounding, but since my umbrella will be keeping my foundation very dry, it will not conduct electricity as effectively, I will probably still want to include more traditional grounding rods outside of my umbrella perimeter and also tie my ground wire into my well casing.
The inspector also added a number of additional inspections for the footings, arch placement, etc. including some “special inspections by a third party” for my arches (I assume before each is poured), my rebar and my shotcrete. I have no idea how these “third party inspections” will work, or who will do them, but I am guessing they won’t be cheap… I still need to talk with the inspector about it.
Building inspector…
The building inspector left us a message saying that the plans were approved (pending the zoning permit which should be completed on Monday). That was really much faster than I expected. When I was in his office on Wednesday, I saw lots of sticky notes in my plans. The only one I was able to read said something about making sure that my under slab ducts drained toward an accessible point (my mechanical room). That was my plan, it just wasn’t specified in the drawings. I expected lots of discussion with him about that or other issues before he approved the plans… But now I expect I will just get the plans back with lots of notes that I will need to comply with in order to pass inspections.
Of course, now we need to pay more than $2000 to get the actual permit. On the whole we have saved about 500$ in permit fees (as I mentioned last week). So we are ahead of our budget… for now. I expect we will start to get behind again later when we need a few extra inspections due to our unusual build. For instance, we will need at least one extra rough electrical and rough plumbing inspection so we can shotcrete the basement (another extra cost associated with the basement) before erecting the walls above it and doing some more rough plumbing and electrical.
The Stakeout
The last thing we need for the building permit is the zoning permit. The zoning inspector’s primary concern is that our property is setback 60 ft from the road. It is a little bit silly because the plans clearly show the house is more than 90 ft from the road and the stakes we put in tonight were temporary (not actually used to build) because we still need to level off the property… But anyway, it was part of the process, so we did it and it was pretty interesting.
The home is based on a circle and uses lots of angles, so I will definitely want to use a proper laser transit for laying out the footings. But at this point, it didn’t need to be very precise. Instead, I used a 2 ft paver and diamond cut the important angles in based on a paper print out (it cracked when I dropped it into position). We knew the distance from two stakes to the center of the house, so we used two ropes measured to the right distance and placed the paver, oriented to North, where the ropes overlapped. Once positioned, the large 90lb (41kg) paver will stay put. Then we measured out from the center and I sprayed my arcs with surveyors spray paint. We put stakes at key corners based on the length of the measuring tape and the angle on the center stone. My younger boy didn’t get excited about it until I sprayed the “S” for South next to one of the key points… Then he got the concept.
The final result was that we could “walk through” the rooms and get a sense of the size and flow in 1:1 scale. On that big hill with the big evening sky, the rooms felt small. We had laid out individual rooms before, but this was the first time we had really laid out the whole house and been able to walk through it. Later, standing on the far west corner of the garage and looking across the field to the far east corner of the bedroom, it looked bigger. My wife was starting to doubt that beds would fit in the rooms, but I guess we need to trust the numbers and doubt our perceptions over rough terrain (or maybe it was my rough survey skills).
I didn’t like the final position of the house. I really wanted the back window of the playroom in a certain location where the view is good and the topology of the site dips for the basement egress windows located below. In order to get that without moving a lot of earth, I think we will need to move the house north and east by ~15 ft. Next time we site the house, I may even start with the location of that window and work backward to the center of the house and then out from there.
My Email
When I setup this website, I also got an email address. Actually, it was the address that helped me pick the final website name. I liked the idea of telling contractors (or whoever) that my email address was “Simon” @ “home in the earth” dot com.
Unfortunately, things have been slow to get started and I did not end up using that email with any contractors. Since I didn’t expect any email, I haven’t checked that account since late 2012.
Well, I checked it last night and there were lots of nice comments and questions there. If you wrote to me over the last year, sorry I didn’t get back to you. I will try to get through those emails over the next few days and I will try to check it more regularly from then on.
Actually I have not told many friends about this site (Other than my wife, I don’t think anyone I know from real life has subscribed (top right column) yet. If you subscribe, you will get an email each time I post.
You can also leave comments on each page. If you just come in to the home page, you may not see the comment window. You need to click on the header for a particular post and then you will see the comment section at the bottom. If you leave an email in a comment, it will not shown on the site, but I can use it to reply.
