Well it has been a while since I got on to the website. I had some work travel, a bit of a vacation, but mostly I was just really busy with work and school (MBA). However, I did find time to work on the house and things have not been standing still.
The engineer and architect have both moved forward. The new storm room design has finally made it into the plans and we had a meeting last week to resolve a number of the engineering issues including issues with the design of the the concrete sunshade and the roof structures for the entry and green house. We are still going thru the plans and cleaning up little details. The windows have not been updated in the drawings yet, but I expect that will be taken care of eventually. We are also adding some details like stone veneer to the design in key locations.
This is how the plans looked last week… You can see the new Storm Room, but the sunshade and rail are changing…
While on vacation, relaxing after a day on the beach, I solved the problem of the chord windows. These high windows were placed on a curved wall. each vault spans a 30 degree section of the vault and we knew that the chord deviation would be too large to span with one piece of glass. We broke the chord window into 3 partial chords as a solution, but when I got the quotes I found that actually tripled the cost to fill the same area. The cost was so high that we actually considered dropping the side windows and just having a 40″ wide arch top in the middle. The epiphany on the beach was that the windows were not spanning the full 30 degree segment of the wall, but rather a much narrower section near the top of the vault. I did some quick trigonometry back in the hotel room and worked out that the max deviation of full chord window from the curved wall would be less than 4 inches… That means it fits on the 6 inch thick wall (sort of) and I could go with one large chord instead of the more expensive 3 part window. Seems kind of obvious now…
This is a detail of the 3 part chord window that I had in the top of each vault… The yellow line represents where a straight window would lay…
You may recall that the “Storm Room” has a 6ft round hole in the floor. I had wanted to put in a glass floor, but that was very expensive (over $6K), so I was settling for a safety rail for now. I figured I could always replace it later if I found a good deal on the glass or struck oil. But then the “temporary” safety rail cost was estimated to be $2K, which sounds a bit high to me. The architect came up with the idea of putting down a steel grate. Sherri and I both liked the idea, although I think what is in our heads may be a bit different than the architect was thinking. Instead of an industrial steel grate, I will work on getting something a little more residential. Hopefully, I can find something to match the spiral stairs and ship ladder that lead up to the storm room, perhaps made by the same company…
Much of the rebar layouts have been done, and I already put together a spreadsheet to calculate the quantity and cost of rebar required… it is not too bad, but I will be looking for a bulk discount and a big truck to deliver it. I will also want to get a bulk deal with the concrete company. The engineer prescribed 3 ft wide footings to support the central tower of the house and there will be a lot of foundation in other areas also. There are also some larger steel beams in a few areas that cost a few hundred dollars each, but I convinced the engineer to remove the really expensive compound bending beam that had been in the design for the sunshade and replace it with a much simpler post and beam design. I am already getting quotes on the components that are fully designed, such as the precast concrete ribs. I am waiting on the architect to complete the detailed plans on all the steel arches.
I re-initiated the relationship with the building inspector and gave him a copy of the plans in progress. He decided to call my architect and reviewed the plans with him directly. I wish I had been in on that meeting because my architect isn’t good about sharing the details. I know he talked to him about stairs (not sure what about) and also told him to change the “Storm Room” label to “Light Well” so he could go a lot easier on the inspection. I thought that was a good sign that he plans to be more helpful than difficult.
Next I plan to meet with the likely builder and go over the plans with him one last time while the engineer and architect are still under a fixed price contract.
We have started the process of getting our current house ready to sell… Or I should say Sherri has started patching and painting over the past decade’s worth of kids vs. drywall damage. I helped by spilling some of the paint on the carpet while trying to help. I am sure my turn will come, there are lots of fun jobs to do. The good news is that the market is picking up a little around here and we may even be above water on our mortgage.
Even with over a month of no posts, the website is up to nearly 10,000 visits, but my views are down to 20 or so per day. Things should get much more interesting once we start building.
And now some eye candy…
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Here is an example of a house made with the same Steelmaster structure that I plan to use on my house… Thanks Houzz…
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This reminds me of our storm room idea… Including the square windows, copper roof and stucco walls. Of course, ours won’t look quite like this…
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This is an earth sheltered grocery story… there are actually a chain of them… http://www.goats-on-the-roof.com/
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This is to illustrate how you curve a kitchen. This was taken in a “Formworks” home.
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Our exterior walls will look something like this… Maybe a bit of a warmer color though.
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You can google Unikabeton to find out more about this concrete sunshade idea… Cool “topology optimization” software is used to figure out the minimum support structure necessary.
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This is a view of my mech room design that I did to show the architect where all the air handling equipment goes…
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Mech room components… The purple spiral is my air distribution. I also have a dehumidifier and an ERV. The vertical green tube is my solar chimney.
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The architect originally drew all the equipment in the middle of the room… I wanted to show a more reasonable layout.
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This was an idea for the ceiling of the rotunda under the storm room…
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These holes in the rotunda come out in the tops of the vaults and allow for circulation up the tower.
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Here is a quick and dirty computer model I sketched up to explain how my concrete arched sunshade would be supported… I didn’t even take the time to put the posts in the right places, but it was enough to convey they idea.
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Here is a little rough coloring over some plans that I made to show the architect a retaining wall and fence that I will need on the roof…
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This is a sketch I made to illustrate how I wanted the ICF wall shaped in profile… It doubles as a parapet to hold back the earth on the garage roof
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This is a 3D model I made to help the architect understand how I wanted the ICF walls attached to the front of the garage…
This past year was different to the previous ones because we finally started bringing in other professionals to share the plan with. Confessing what I planned to do made it all more real. In exchange for bringing people in, I had to relinquish some control, which was also a bit of a stress for me. But I have to admit that having someone else do all the work of drawing the elevation views did free me up to think about details…
I some times think of it as “paying for friends to talk about stuff you like”, kind of sad and it didn’t really work out as collaboratively as I had hoped. And since I am paying most of them, I could never really trust their affirmation that I was sane ;^).
The plan had been to start construction during Q3, 2012. It didn’t work out, primarily due to delays with the engineer (who slowed down the architect because he was waiting for the architect).
If those delays had a silver lining, it was that they gave us more time to figure things out and time to set aside even more money for the build. It also gave me time to meet Scott who was building his own earth shelter near Battle Creek and I learned some valuable things there. I guess I will just keep right on learning things and improving the design, but at some point, I would like to start building and let the mistakes fall where they may. My wife and I just had a little discussion about what could put off our plans to start in 2013… That list of hurdles may be a good New Years post. In the mean time, here is our year end update…
I went to the architects last April with a pretty complete idea of what I wanted to build. I wanted help with the construction drawings and I wanted to get some perspective and collaboration. The drawings are coming, and I certainly appreciate how delegating that task has freed up my time for details. Collaboration (which I define as “talking thru ideas to come up with a better than either of us would have come up on our own) was elusive, but they did add a few good features to improve the design.
For instance, I had originally designed the front of the house with three concrete sunshades, but the architect combined them into a single one that really helped unify the front of the house. He also improved the way the hall passed the sun room for better flow, adjusted the extent of the two smaller vaults for better rhythm and a few other things. Some times, these changes caused problems that were left un-fixed… For instance, the combination of changing the way the hall went thru the sun room and adjusting the location for the end of the vault over the sun-room left us with a very undefined ceiling and load paths that hung in mid air. I asked them about that for months without an answer.
Mid November, my architect mentioned that he thought his assistant had taken care of all our complaints and question and they were almost done… I didn’t think so, so I went thru my emails (over 100 of them) and collected all the un-resolved issues into a ppt slide deck 21 slides long. I mercifully broke things up so that each slide focused on only one sheet of the drawing.
These are sketches of the storm room that I got from the architect. He never explained any of them to me (no collaboration)
Some of the slides were short, such as the slide for the title sheet that simply pointed out an incorrect note about the foundations… but other slides were quite long and detailed and included many points and drawings about various concerns that I had been waiting for answers to… The architects took it pretty well, but over a month later, they are still working their way thru the corrections (and have not actually fixed that silly note on the title sheet) and have not gotten back to me on even one third of the questions.
The design development for the storm room never really got anywhere although the architect did send me a few sketches. Perhaps these designs were not what I was looking for, or perhaps I was just looking for collaboration (an interactive back and forth exchange), but I didn’t like any of them. I wanted something that would unify the design of the house, and I didn’t think any of these ideas did that… Eventually this December, I sat down with my pencil crayons and solved a number of these problems so I could just present my solutions to the architects so we could move forward.
Our architect’s assistant also drew up some quick 3D sketches. We ruled them out for various reasons.
My wife and I met with the architect and his assistant the Friday before Christmas. We showed our latest sketches for the “storm room” (the tower on the top of the house that will let us view 360 degrees of weather), and the structure for the entry and sun room (aka “green house”, but that would be hyperbole). We also discussed our new window list and answered questions about the HVAC layout (ventilation actually). While there, the assistant quickly modeled up something in 3D CAD (rhino3D) for the storm room and also showed us an interesting 3D model of the entry way in order to propose a new feature. We liked his suggestion and are hopeful that the plans will actually be completed within a month or two, at least with the architect.
I am quite a bit more concerned about the engineer since we haven’t heard anything from him in over 7 weeks. I will check up on his progress in early January. The biggest mistake with the engineer was expecting too much collaboration instead of just validation. I am sure it was frustrating for him since “collaboration” is not easy to estimate. Now that I am neck deep, I wish I had been more specific about what I expected him to bring to the team, and I would have expected a lower price tag with that reduced uncertainty.
This past month, we meet again with Marvin windows and Pella windows. Again, perhaps collaboration is a bit too much to expect from a window company… But that really is what we wanted. We originally planned on Marvin because they were one of the few American window companies that produced low-E glass with high solar heat gain. They also had “push out” casement windows that I preferred to the crank outs… And they had very wide casement windows (possible due to their aluminum extrusion construction), french windows, more size flexibility, etc. I totally ignored Pella for my first round, along with other “big box” brands.
Sherri and I never really liked the Marvin reps in our area. Some never did get back to us with a quote (even though I visited several times) and the ones who did were a bit too pushy. We got pretty far into the process with one location (that will remain nameless to protect the guilty). Maybe it was just a generational thing, but we didn’t like their sales technique or how they talked to us without giving us useful information. They used lots of phrases like “of course you want to buy the best”… When I asked about how the features of a window affected the price, they kept saying they “hardly matter”. For instance, I wanted to understand the difference between the cost of a round top casement and a regular casement mulled with a fixed arch top transom… I knew the opening round top window would be more, but I wanted to understand how much more. They went on and on about how I certainly wouldn’t want to even consider the fixed transom option, how it wouldn’t go with the style of the house and that the round top wouldn’t be much more expensive anyway… Well a few days later when I finally got the price for each, I found the round-top was quite a lot more expensive. Again, perhaps it was just their age, but they always acted like getting a price on anything would be a huge amount of effort and I had to come in to see them because it was difficult to get the quotes into an email…
In contrast, the Pella rep was very likable. She understood that we wanted to understand the pricing so we could make good decisions. She also joked that she was a part time marriage counselor a roll we found she was pretty good at. Every time we wanted to know a price for something, she would just enter it into her computer various different ways so we could see the effect. This was enormously helpful. She built the window list on her computer right in front of us. We could see the options she was entering and ask her about adjustments, etc. For instance, while the Marvin rep had hardly said anything about Tempered glass or given us the rules for it, the Pella rep explained all the rules (so we could design around them) and showed us the resulting price difference. When she didn’t know something, she was frank with us and took a note for later…
Some of the windows from our window schedule. The shape of W3 and the width of W4 were only available from Marvin
The quotes we had received from Marvin had ruled out the push out casements (double the price), along with French casements (quadruple the price). We also found out that Pella now had the passive solar gain glass that we wanted. We were down to a couple “special” windows forcing us into Pella… These were a half arch top (W3) and its neighboring 40″ wide casement (W4) (Pella topped out at 35″ wide). Not only would we have to pay the much higher Marvin price for these two windows (x2 for symmetry), but we would need to buy all the windows from Marvin (even the ordinary ones) and it actually more than doubled the overall cost of the window package. Sherri and I liked the look of W3, it was one of the enhancements the architect added when he put the wide sunshade across the front of the house, but it wasn’t worth adding more than $30K to the cost of the home. Neither was having W4 be 40 inches instead of 35.
Here is the window arrangement for the front of the house. W3 tucks under the sunshade. It is really a single window with a faux mull (to save money). We decided to save even more money by making it a rectangle. W4, the casement next to W3, would lose 7 inches of width.
We decided to make the switch to Pella. We worked with the rep to adjust our window schedule to standard Pella sizes and tool that list into the architect. One non “brand” change we made was for the 3 part windows at the ends of the vaults (W12)… Each of the 3 sections costs the same price as a full width window of the same overall area, but the wall curvature forced us to break it into 3 sections. The W12 combo of 3 windows was nearly $4K; since there were 6 of these, that would add up to a big headache. We decided to reduce the height and have only the single central arch top for about 1/4 the price.
A CAD drawing of the rib, done by the engineer.
Another sourcing issue was finding a company to handle my precast architectural ribs. I contacted a bunch of companies, but the first round were all concerned that they didn’t have the skill to handle it. They were mostly experienced with highway construction or sewer components. They did point me toward some companies that could help (the key was to include the work “architectural” in my search for “precast concrete”), but I have not received quotes from those companies yet.
The website development is going slow (no blog posts in more than 7 weeks doesn’t help). I did some work on some pages (such as this inspiring one on urinals ;^)). At this point, we have had nearly 7500 visitors from all over the world (check out the map on the right) with a max of 127 hits on Nov 14th.
For some reason, my comment system has stopped working on the home page. I will try to figure that out, but it looks like you can still leave comments if you browse to the post thru the tree on the right.
On the Houzz site, they did a bit on Hobbit homes that I thought I should post a link to…
Oh yea, if you are reading this in your email, that doesn’t work as well as clicking the link and reading it on the website… You get the pictures that way. ;^) I also tend make a bunch of typo’s on my first draft that I catch 10 seconds after I post. The live link includes any updates…
And now the part you have all been waiting for… A gallery of eye candy.
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I found this geodesic concrete dome on tinyhouseblog.com, a fun little website. I think shotcrete over rebar is easier, but this seems fun.
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This is part way thru construction, you can find more pics on the site, but I thought it looked better here than after they added the shingles.
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Copper trellis?
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Malcolm Wells talked about using copper pipe for a trellis, but this is one of the few examples I could find a picture of.
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Pella now has “Natural Sun” glass that is perfect for what I need, but it is only on the price list for Canada. Clearly, the weather crosses the border into Michigan, but I had to special order to get this kind of glass.
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I like these “kitchen garage” ideas from houzz.com
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Hide away ideas from Houzz
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Now this is just fun.
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I like the bump on this porch and how it accommodates the arch top door… This may be something to consider for my design.
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A full passive solar roof
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This copper roof gives a hint for how we will do the storm room… I may like to do copper diamond shingles on 2 of the six sides…
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Radiused copper seam roof under construction…
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We are looking into copper roofs, and where better to find inspiration than the copper architecture awards
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I got this from the http://thecarpentryway.blogspot.com
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I like reticulated ceilings. I got this from http://thecarpentryway.blogspot.com
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After spending a couple days working on our storm room roof design, we needed to see something like this to feel that ours was relatively normal.
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Sherri and I are looking for front doors that go with copper roofs… We liked the style of this one.
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Just a cool cave house… Not the same as earth sheltered, but we appreciate it anyway.
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Thanks to the new Hobbit movie, earth sheltered homes are now available in lego…
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I recall this was in northern Europe, but I can’t find its source right now… Not really earth sheltered, but rather plant covered.
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I liked this a lot. Maybe along the back wall of the living room.
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Just thought this thing was cool, forgot where I got it.
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For more precise and simple setup of the rebar, I will use precision curved steel tubes. I plan to use something like these cheap (<5$) scaffold bases to hold it all up.
I put this at the bottom so few will find it, but I here by resolve to create more, but much much shorter, posts for 2013 ;^)
This is another status update…
Lately, I have been getting quotes on plumbing related things and learning a lot about Solar Hot Water… I haven’t had time to do the page justice yet, but here is the start of my Solar Hot Water page. I have seen that there are many ways that these systems are put together in terms of connections between the solar array and the hot water tank and between the hot water tank and the backup heating system… Many of the ways seem like terrible ideas, but I will talk about that on the separate page.
We have also updated our well quotes and things seem to have gone up by 20% over the past year. Now that I have an actual site plan, I planned to put the well quite some distance from the house, but apparently that is not a good idea and I will need to find a closer location.
Today we had our 3rd face to face meeting with the engineer. It was our first since our G8 summit (which I thought I had written about, but I guess I didn’t) 5 months ago. I have offered to meet many times, but they have not been interested. I think our architect prefers to stay between his customers and his engineer, or perhaps they didn’t think I would help, or perhaps they didn’t have time to meet with me. What ever the reason, I really think this separation has wasted a lot of time for this particular engineering intensive project where I could have helped a lot. The project was supposed to be done already, but it feels like we are just getting started with the engineering.
Anyway, we had the meeting to get on the same page. I had been asking questions over email for months without any answers since July. We asked for the meeting because the 5 pages I have received so far showed that the engineer was not getting or not understanding the long and detailed emails, ppts and other documents I was sending. He appeared to be designing the steel arches to carry the full weight rather than seeing it as support for the rebar and Shotcrete, which would ultimately carry the full weight. Plus, as he put it, he had made the design even more “robust” than it needed to be. The problem for me is that his more “robust” design would cost many times more to build, to the point where it might break my budget and prevent me from moving forward with construction at all.
The Engineer came up with this design to support the inside end of the ribs. It was different than I had originally planned, but would allow me to setup the ribs before the shotcrete work began, which might save a lot of hassle, even if I had to pay a bit extra for the post. We also talked about adding some holes thru the vertical portion so we could thread rebar thru and better tie these into the central column of the home.
At the meeting, I asked if he had considered the dimensions of the steel and rebar shown in the example plans that I had sent him back on May 4th. These were fully engineered plans for a similarly constructed earth sheltered home that I thought he could use as a reference; but he clearly didn’t recall seeing those at all. This was frustrating because I have been referring back to those in many of my emails and he never even replied to ask what I was talking about. He also didn’t appear to have looked at any of the ppts of construction photos I had sent him that showed the kind of arches and assembly process I was talking about. He did have a print out of my most recent sketches, and that helped with the conversation.
I had brought in a list of topics to discuss. These had been building up for 4 months and we went thru them one by one. It only took about an hour. He said that he would “revisit” what he had done so far with my smaller sized arches, rebar, etc. as shown in the other engineered drawings, but of course, he will need to prove out the math himself. That sounded reasonable to me.
We also talked a little about some other aspect of the design that he was struggling with (the overhang off the front of the house) and I told him he could simplify the problem by adding pilasters on the outside that took the weight off the curved wall completely. Hopefully he saw that as an example of how I could help simplify future discussions… We will see.
Most importantly, we talked about needing to get all the drawings done in the next 3 months or so. They agreed it would be “no problem”.
I expect we will reach 5000 all time visitors this week (since June), last week alone we had 416 visitors… Not bad considering I have hardly told anyone about the site. I will start talking about it after the pages get filled in better or maybe not until we are actually ready to break ground… I got a deal when I started my site to get 100$ worth of Google Adwords that I can use when I am ready. Google Analytics tells me that the most popular search term used to find my site is still “The Hobbit” (brought in 135 visitors since June). A search for “Earth Shelter”, my main focus, was only in 6th place and “Earth Tubes” were in 8th place.
This is the part of the show where I just dump a gallery of pics I have been looking at or making lately…
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The Engineer came up with this design to support the inside end of the ribs. It was different than I had originally planned, but would allow me to setup the ribs before the shotcrete work began, which might save a lot of hassle, even if I had to pay a bit extra for the post. We also talked about adding some holes thru the vertical portion so we could thread rebar thru and better tie these into the central column of the home.
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A CAD drawing of the rib, done by the engineer. We talked a bit about this today and I would like to make it 4 inches thicker (12 x 12) so we can reduce some of the rebar. I will also put some holes thru the right side so I can thread rebar thru and tie these into the central column more easily…
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Another cool building… Gota love the wide stone over the door. I guess you build with what you have.
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Just a cool picture…
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Sherri and I have talked about using stones for coat hooks (we have seen it done at various art fairs, but I thought this was interesting also… On the other extreme, i also like the streamlined flold-away coat hooks you can get from IKEA.
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I like the idea of this shower bench… The solid blue glass… But I don’t love the rest of it… Not sure where I would find something like this yet though…
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I love the skylight in this earth sheltered (I hope) room…
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Just a humorous shot of earth sheltered statues on easter island… (from 9gag)
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I liked these corner drawers, but I don’t really have a corner like this in my kitchen.
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I probably can’t afford this kind of masonry, and I know I don’t have time to trim those bushes, but I think this looks great together. probably got this from Houzz.com
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My architect sent me this cool image. he liked the way the modern earth sheltered home was juxtaposed against the old world chateau…
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Another ppt “drawing” that I sent the engineer to give an idea on the bracket I want to use. The tricky bit is that the arches need to set plumb even though the arch has a continuous curve… I want to avoid creating custom brackets, but this is just an early idea… We may come up with something better.
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This is one of the ppt “drawings” I sent the engineer a few weeks ago after getting his cross section. This is more what I was looking for…
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I like the masonry and the cupboards from this shot. But I am sure Sherri wouldn’t like that stone in the house, bug hiding dust collectors… I think I got it from pintrest.com
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We have a long hall of cupboards in the hall and I think these hampers are a great idea for the bottom row.
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I liked the look of this steel log rack and think it will work well next to our woodstove where its shape will mirror the ceiling. Not a bad price from Frontgate.
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I have long planned a green “living wall” for the back of my green house… This isn’t quite what I was thinking, but it is interesting.
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This is a vaulted ceiling with a white on creme color set… I think I found this on Houzz and set it aside for later.
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I really liked this circle door, but was shocked to find the price was higher than the much more elaborate one with the arched transom… not sure why. maybe I can find something similar for a better price.
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I like this idea of a dog house under the stairs. I may try and work this in under the spiral stairs, opening into the kitchen. Of course, I have not run this by the wife yet.
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I like the idea of outdoor conversation pits… I have an “egress well” that I might expand into something like this.
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They build these “earth sheltered” green bridges in Germany to allow the wildlife to safely cross the highway. Malcolm Wells would have liked to see this.
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For some reason, I love pictures like this… Unintentionally earth sheltered.
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Gota love the masonry of this bridge.
