The first week back at school, my son had to write about what he did over the summer. I figured it should go on the website. ~Simon
This summer I built my house. For the last ten years my dad has been planning the design of my new house, and last year we started construction! For the last year we have been building our new house. You want to hear something really cool? It’s an underground house!
This summer I’ve worked so much and spent many Saturdays at construction. It’s very exhausting, but there are some parts I have enjoyed though. These include pouring the cement; we do this in areas such as the downstairs floor, the walls of the basement, and the garage back wall.
Making arches is fun too! To make the arches, we use the molds that my dad made and pour cement into them. The next day we take off the molds and there are nicely made arches waiting for us to polish and make cool patterns on. So far we have six out of eleven done and only two of them half way polished, while the others haven’t even been smoothed yet!
Another thing that is super fun is when my mom needs me to climb up on top of the bedroom frame to tie wires so that it is ready for cement to get poured inside the frame. I really enjoy climbing high and it’s really cool how you can observe everything below you.
My favorite thing to do is to find frogs and turtles. The basement isn’t covered up yet, so lots of frogs and baby snapping turtles fall in and die. Each day I try to find and catch every frog and turtle I can before they dry up. I have to shovel out their dead bodies. The most I have saved in one day was ten frogs and two turtles.
During the summer, I also enjoyed swimming in my grandparents’ pool. I played at the park, visited museums, and I also played at my friends’ houses. The greatest thing I did this summer though was building my house.
I got my Wingscapes Timelapse Cam years ago when I first bought the property… Originally, it was that so I could trace the shadows moving across my lot (important for passive solar positioning), but I ended up enjoying recording the construction process with it also. Lately, I have wanted a better camera. Eventually, my whining paid off and my wife got me a GoPro Hero3 for my birthday. “White” just means that it is at the low end of the GoPro video range, but it still has the timelapse feature that I wanted.
For a comparative test, I mounted the two cameras side by side and recorded some timelapse footage for an “odd job” that I did (see the video link above).
The “odd job” was building a giant wall out of bales of rigid insulation… Why? I wanted to put a tarp across the back of the Quonset hut to stop the wind from blowing thru. This would allow me to use the garage as a workshop… But it was like a wind tunnel in there and I couldn’t keep the tarp still long enough to bolt it on… I had these bales of rigid insulation already stacked somewhere else on the property, and I decided to restack them at the back of the quonset hut to block the wind… It worked very well, and I chuckled at the idea of having an R-value of ~240. At some later point, I will put up ICFs to form a proper wall, but I imagine even that would have been difficult in the wind tunnel environment of that quonset hut…
Anyway, let’s compare…
Wingscapes Pros:
Much better battery life (days or weeks with 4AA batteries) and better time lapse options for longer duration’s (10 seconds to daily)…
This makes sense because that is what it was designed for.
Wingscapes Cons:
A tiny pinhole lens in a large heavy housing that can be a challenge to setup. It also has manual focus (that I have messed up a few times) and a basic, but awkwardly placed, view finder with no way to really tell how the shots are coming out until you download them.
I really can’t understand why the wingscapes cam needs to be so bulky or why the birdwatchers who buy them don’t demand better optics.
GoPro Pros:
Much better optics, plus its lens is very wide angle, which will help with the interior shots later. The GoPro is also much smaller and easier to move around. The GOPro settings can actually be controlled from my phone and my phone screen actually works as the view finder (which I thought was really cool until I realized how quickly the wi-fi used up the battery).
The timelapse options are actually better on the low end of the range… With a number of options between Half a second and 60 seconds… It also has much better Video options. Even though mine is just the white edition, it gives HD up to 60FPS.
And this all makes sense because this camera is meant to be strapped to an adrenalin junkie and pushed off a cliff. Its timelapse options are more intended for capturing a half hour of sunset than a day at the build site.
GoPro Cons:
The battery life is poor (for a timelapse). It can do 3 hours of video at 60 FPS, so I expected that it could go for ages on timelapse at 0.2 FPS, but it didn’t make much more than 4 hours, (even without the wi-fi viewfinder turned on, which drains the power even faster)… And when the battery dies, it is a special GOPro battery, so I can’t replace it with a spare. Also, the color seems less vivid on the GoPro, but I have only tested it on grey days and with pretty grey subject matter…
In summary… I don’t plan to get rid of either camera. They each have their place and will help me catch good footage and we try to get this house built over the summer.
This afternoon, my wife and I had our most expensive date ever!
We closed on our construction loan!
Getting this loan was a long and painful process that involved an appraiser, our insurance lady (that we ended up dumping because she was messing everything up) and a few other big surprises. I plan to document more at a later date, but here are the basics of what happened recently.
Last week, we had asked for an updated estimate of the closing costs. Of course, there were all the usual “fees”, including flood inspection, etc. The biggest of the recent surprises was that the bank wanted us to deposit all the money we planned to use, up front, in their account, so they could manage the disbursements and make sure it all goes into the construction. The difference with this latest update was that the bank added 10% more to cover “unexpected costs”. This was a significant jump that had not been included in previous discussions (they had been willing to accept that I had built safety factors into each line item). We scrambled to figure out how to scratch together the additional money (imagine suddenly needing to find 10% of the cost to build your home).
We could have swung it, but I was worried about our shrinking liquidity (I still need to buy tools, rent equipment, etc. and those costs are not covered by the construction loan). We ended up deciding to take some money out of our retirement savings plan. We will need to start paying it back to ourselves immediately (it starts coming out of my next pay check) or face a tax penalty, but the interest rate (to ourselves) was good and there were no significant fees. It was actually a pretty painless process and we put the paperwork together in about 20 minutes (Sherri and I working together). We took a bit more than we thought we needed, just in case. That check arrived yesterday.
Today started with Sherri still up from the night before going over the receipts that we have already paid. I gave up and went to bed at midnight, but I assume she checked everything more than twice more (as is her nature). These receipts are required to support our “Sworn Statement” that says how much we have paid and how much we have left to pay.
We showed up for our lunch time appointment at the bank today with a big accordion-folder worth of paperwork.
The first biggest surprise was that we were expected to pay off the remaining mortgage on our land before the new loan would commence. I had thought our land may come up since the appraisal was based on the house and land and I figured it may occur to the bank that they had already loaned us something, but I thought they would take the money out of what they were going to loan us now. Instead it was added up front as closing costs before the other loan would go through. Ouch. Good thing we had more in the account that we thought we needed. But this is a significant cut to our liquidity.
The silver lining is that we now own the land outright and no longer have that land payment. Also, the new mortgage percentage went down a bit from the last estimate, so in the end, our payment is very reasonable (over 30% lower than we thought it would be for the house and land payments combined).
We spent over an hour signing papers. Sherri is very thorough and likes to read everything; she found a number of mistakes, including her name spelled wrong several ways on a single page. The lady at the bank had to make a number of runs back upstairs to reprint documents with corrections. She was getting a bit tired by the end of it.
Eventually we got through it all and the Earth Sheltered Umbrella Home is fully funded.
Sourcing
I finally got the bill for the footings today. It was a volume plus materials sort of deal, so I was a bit nervous about how the cost of materials would add up. However, it did seem reasonable. I am not thrilled about all the unused forming supplies that I bought. I hope they don’t get wrecked by the weather before we can use them on the main floor footings (I have them covered with 6mil plastic at the moment). The cost of the concrete was 6% lower than expected and the giant pump truck was 14% lower than expected. Unfortunately, the rebar and other steel was 17% higher than expected, probably due to that 18% bump in the price of steel over the past year. Overall, we are still on budget.
I also purchased a new 26ft tall scaffold tower today. I had been trying to get a used one. There were not many to choose from and most looked like rusty pieces of junk. The worst part was they were priced only 30% below new. I found one nice aluminum one for a reasonable price, but I called the guy and he had sold it for scrap. In the end, I needed one next week, so I decided to pay a little more and get a brand new one, and that was for a “delux” model with the extra wide outriggers and other safety features. It should arrive the middle of next week along with my steel studs (which were originally supposed to arrive last Friday). I should be able to sell it at the end of construction for a reasonable price.
I had also been looking at buying turnbuckles to help me plumb the steel stud walls (tricky because I don’t have a top track to attach to). I was looking at the sort of thing that ICF installer’s use to straighten and plumb their walls before a pour. I found them to be very expensive, so I designed my own and priced it out. I figure I can make equivalent hardware for less than 1/10th the price of buying them. The only catch is that I will need to buy that MIG welder sooner, but I planned to get it for the main floor steel anyway.
I have a 25% off coupon for a nice MIG welder (another thing I couldn’t find second hand), and will probably pick that up this weekend.
Construction Birds
Some of you may have caught my video on the river swallows at the construction site… Here it is anyway.
Eye Candy
Yes, time for some eye candy.
As I prep for my electrical work, this struck me as funny…
When I saw this Cow on the roof, all I could think was, “I bet he wishes that was an earth sheltered roof.”
I like these leaf pavers, may be a fun thing to do with any extra concrete.
I also like the idea of a drill bit for tying the rebar.
An interesting tool for tying rebar…
A Bank swallows nest
Another S-type quonset hut similar in size to my own (which I ordered last week)
This Quonset hut looks big, but it is actually an S30x40. Perhaps this one is 17′ high, mine is 15′.
I liked the simple design of this turnbuckle… In inspired my own (totally different) design.
This is the 26ft tall deluxe scaffold tower I bought this week. Should be pretty scary to work at that hight.
My extra “forming supplies”. Actually, the pile is bigger now since they stripped the forms and put those boards back on the pile.
Another thing that is super fun is when my mom needs me to climb up on top of the bedroom frame to tie wires so that it is ready for cement to get poured inside the frame. I really enjoy climbing high and it’s really cool how you can observe everything below you.
