You know that feeling when you are about to do something that you think may be a bit unusual or even slightly crazy and then someone just jumps in and totally tops any craziness you could have thought of?  Well, that is how I feel about the Montana Magica Lodge in Chile.

The Magic Mountain Lodge in Chile. Check out their web page for more pics.

Someone down there in Hulio-Huio said, “lets make an earth sheltered hotel.”  And someone else said, “Yea, but lets put a great big waterfall on top of it.”  And instead of calming them down,  someone else in the room said, “that’s a great idea, and lets use a rope bridge to get to it.”  

And they did; and you can book a suite for $300 US per night…   

The site doesn’t provide specific information on the construction of the mountain, but I did read a general statement that the buildings were constructed of wood.  It it has a wood frame, it looks like it was also covered in waterproofing and rock before plants and perhaps a very small amount of soil were added.

A look at one of the suites

And this is just one of a number of really strange buildings they have done there at Hulio~Hulio…

Anyway, point is, if anyone thinks I am a bit crazy, I can just show them this and point out how at least I resisted the urge to build a magic mountain with a waterfall and a rope bridge…

Architect

Well, we got the “final drawings” yesterday several weeks after the last final set.  I had gone thru and found a number of issues and hopefully they are all sorted.   Overall the plans look pretty good; at least they are good enough to start building.

a clip of the front elevation “colorized” to give you an idea of the earth cover…

I already know of a number of things I would change or fix, but I just can’t wait anymore so I will make these adjustments on the fly.

As examples of things I plan to add…

• I want to rough in some plumbing in the basement, easier now than later…  
• I want to use a tube skylight to get some light into the guest bathroom
• I want to add a door for access under the basement stairs
• I might want to move the garage 4 ft further from the house, mainly so the dirt on the garage has more slope.  I might save money by needing less of a retaining wall, and the extra space in the mud room would be bonus. 
• I might put in an extra garage skylight
• etc.

As examples of things I might fix…

• The elevation of the windows and roof of the storm room and the windows of the mezzanine should probably be reduced by 9 inches
• The office window should probably be 6 inches lower
• I don’t like the way the french drains are laid out (I have other ideas ;^)
• The garage doors are listed as 7×7, I think I should go with at least 8×7, if I can make them fit…
• etc.

There are also a few things that are just missing from the plans, but I will figure them out later.  For instance, there are no plans for the steel arch structure of the storm room or the ventilation return from the guest rooms.  Details are pretty scarce in these plans and we will be figuring out a number of things as we go along.  I will start by making up a bunch of shop drawings so I can get decent quotes on all my steel beams.

But overall, I am just thrilled that we are “done” with this portion and can move on to the next.

The original time estimate from the architect was 3 months, and it has been more than 12.  The extra time allowed us to put away more money for construction, but I would have liked to have been done several months ago so I could take advantage of the nice spring weather.   At this point, I am not sure we will be closed in by winter and that may affect my kids school plans.

I am sure the architect underestimated how much work would be involved or perhaps how closely I would review the work, so I appreciated that he honored the original estimate and we didn’t go over.  On the other hand, most of the work was done by his assistant (a first year architecture student) and I think I did the bulk of the “review” work that the architect would normally need to do.

Engineer

For those who have been following the story, the engineer and I had not quite seen eye to eye on some things.  He was talking about getting more money and I wanted some basic mistakes fixed and some other things engineered properly.  I am sure it was mostly just mis-communication, but I was still concerned about how it would all work out.   The architect was the go between.   In the end, I think the architect worked out a deal (I was not given details) where he took over fixing the drawing mistakes (such as including the foundation at the corner of the basement) and making small changes (such as replacing the 6″ brackets with a 4″ one that wouldn’t penetrate the insulation)  and I was told not to worry about the other things I wanted engineered (such as the rebar layout for the ICF wall of the garage).    I have not paid the engineer for at least 4 months, but now that things are done, I will be sending in the final check this week.  I doubt I will ever get any breakdown of what work was actually done to ensure the home was structurally engineered…

Here you can see that the engineer did the ICF rebar layout before realizing that the rebar went past the edges of the quonset hut… They added the ICF, but rather than adjusting the rebar layout in the drawings, I have just been told to extend the pattern outward. I assume no additional calculations were made, but I guess it was already much stronger than it needed to be.

Next Steps

Now that the architect is done, I have a bunch of stuff to take care of…

The biggest thing is the banking paperwork.  We were already “pre-approved” for enough money based on our credit, but the harder part is calculating all the costs and providing the bank enough information to value the house high enough that they will actually loan us the money.  This means I am working on getting all my quotes in a row.

Getting the ducks in a row doesn’t mean it will be easy…

To start, I contacted a number of local concrete suppliers and asked them for suggestions on who I should hire for various parts of the process (foundation, floors, shotcrete, aircrete, finishing, etc.)  This gave me a number of good leads that I am following up on.

In an ideal world, I would be able to send potential contractors emails of the plans and they could send me back a nice quote calculated in excel, etc.  However, most of these trades people are much better at their trades than they are at computers or writing quotes.  I guess that is fair enough, but it does make it more challenging.   One excavator met me out at the property 2 weeks ago.  I asked if I could email him the plans, but he didn’t know what his email address was.  He seemed like a good guy, so I ended up giving him a couple big sheets of my plans, but I have not heard back yet.  I called him again a couple days ago.

Actually the excavator did give me some good info.  He is a local (he did the neighbors foundations and driveways) and was very familiar with the soil.  He  told me that it drained so well he didn’t need gravel for the drain tile and expected no frost heave with the driveway (he didn’t plan to use any geotextiles).   I talked to the neighbors and they had good things to say.  We also talked about how he would site the house.  Normally, the excavator can do it themselves, and at first he told me he could handle a circle, but once he saw the plans, he told me that I would need to get a surveyor to mark out all the angles, so there will be some additional cost there…

I need to get a copy of the plans out to the architectural association.  Hopefully they won’t give me a hard time or cause any delays.  The president said that an emailed PDF of the plans would be enough, but at least one of the board members said he wanted a full print out.   I can understand why, but it is harder than email and will cost me more than $60 to print.  I plan to tell them that I will bring the plans, but want to attend the first part of their meeting so I can present it to them and answer any initial questions.  I will get right on sending out that email after posting some eye candy here.

Eye Candy

I have been pretty busy lately, and therefore we are a bit short on eye candy.  I did stumble upon a couple more earth sheltered hotels, but I will post those separately.

Soil Experiment

My soil temperature experiment is on going.  I recently collected my 15th month of data and updated the charts on that page.  Now that we have more than a years worth of data, it is clear that the deeper probes are in more a more thermally stable environment.  Specifically, the 10 ft deep probe shows that soil temperatures at that depth peak (max or min temp) nearly 3 months behind the air temperature peak.  In other words, the heat of June takes until September to reach that depth.   The amplitude of the temperature variation at 10 ft depth is similar to the 9 month average air temperature, which is a small fraction of the air temperature variation.

Temp Profiles of all the probes… Notice the difference between the “dry” and “control” probes is slight and may actually be due to slight variations in the depth.

These results are interesting because they contradict a lot of the oversimplified and unsupported statements that you find in many earth sheltered home books.

The Storm Room Design

We just finished that fantastic period between semesters.  That means that I am headed back to work on my MBA.  I am just taking one course this semester, and will probably take off the rest of the year if construction starts in the spring.  While I was off I did a few things around our current house, watched some movies, played with my kids, researched some house related stuff, started a non-house related book (1491), etc.

Meanwhile, my architects assistant also had time off and the house seemed to leap forward again.  Without school to keep him busy, the architects assistant has played with rendering portions of the house in 3D.  This lead to design questions in certain areas, which lead to me generating some new 3D models in response.  This lead to the designs of the storm room, entry, green house and even my duct work taking a step forward.

As I expected, the architect has done the majority of his work in 2D.  When looking for an architect, I actually counted this as a good thing.  3D models are fun, but my geometry is complicated/difficult by CAD standards (Shotcrete is very liberating when it come to actually building these shapes) and I didn’t want the architects either spending too much of their effort on the CAD (rather than the design) or dumbing down the design to make it easier to CAD.  In the end, the homes are always built from 2D blueprints anyway.

We also had a fun collaborative session after trading some models back and forth.  At least it was fun for me, I hope it was pleasant enough for the architects assistant ;).  I think we pretty much figured out the storm room by the end of that.

While most people think of a “Storm Room” as a cellar where you hide from storms, the “Storm Room” in my design is a concrete room on the top of my house that gives me 360 degree views.  I am looking forward to sitting up there and watching the storms roll by.

Now the assistant architect’s classes are starting back up, so we are not sure if this pace will continue or not, but I definitely feel like we have crossed a hump…  Still no word from the engineer though. ;^(

Here are some renderings of some of the 3D models we passed back and forth…