In order to bury the office apse at the front of our earth sheltered home, I needed to build a retaining wall with a window in it. For this corner of the build, I decided to use CMU’s, Concrete Masonry Units, AKA concrete blocks. We also had to insulate the apse structure.
I may come back and add some detail here. For now, I’ll just post the video and gallery of pics to tell the story.
The Video
The Gallery
Here are some pics to help tell the story.
Sherri getting a selfie
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Sherri and I decided to roughly imitate the “American Gothic” paining.
Couldn’t hold the straight face
And back to work…
Camera caught a block drop in mid air and I thought it looked worth keeping.
Michael’s turn to get a selfie
We put 4 inches of XPS between the apse and the retaining wall. This first 4 feet were easy because of the simple curvature.
My mother faithfully working on the insulation dome.
Here Michael is cranking away on the dome. You know this process is decent when an 11 year old kid can crank it out.
Posing with my subway vinyl. In theory, you are only supposed to use these with the image downward, but I couldn’t resist.
We glued the vinyls together with HH-66 vinyl cement. It basically melts them together with a chemical bond.
Perspective…
Here you can see that the insulation layer completely separates the inner and outer walls. The rebar and lath were covered in concrete, ferro-cement style.
It was getting dark by the time I got that concrete up on the eyebrow.
The insulation mosaic was rough looking, but functional.
Go pro caught this fun one as I drove by… I guess I was looking at the camera to avoid driving over the tripod.
We needed to hook up the septic side lines to run from the bedrooms and garage to the main central line coming from under the basement. The original plan had these running under the house, but the plumber suggested that it would be much easier to run the line outside the house completely… At some later point, we also decided to run the bedroom electrical along this outside line. Of course, this all required some digging. Gota love that nice soft sand.
The Video
Some details
The Stack:
The bedroom septic line had a further run and needed to be below frost depth, so it connected at a lower point on the stack. Then I connected the garage line at a higher point. However, I thought it would be a good idea to slope it more and get deeper than I had to… Some plumbers say that you shouldn’t slope too much because the solids and liquids will separate and you will have clogging problems. I have done my research and determined that was not true (just a plumbers wives’ tale) so I didn’t mind sloping it more. However, after making the stack connection with the Y-pipe shown in the video, I decided that I didn’t like the angle of the connection. Basically, these pipes are designed to connect at closer to perpendicular or maybe 5 degrees off. My original connection was maybe 20 degrees off. It was probably sealed, but it didn’t look great and I didn’t want to take any chances. I ended up cutting off that Y-connection and extending the stack so i could connect at a higher point with less slope.
The Shortcut:
The plumbing and the electrical in the bedroom wing both connect in the laundry room, very close to eachother so they can exit from the same hole and follow the same trench… However, I didn’t measure conservatively enough and although the electrical cables could reach the panel, I was worried about being a few inches short of making final connections, so we ended up digging a short cut trench for the electrical cables. At least we could still re-use about 2/3rds of the trench.
The Electrical cables:
Earlier, I had experimented with other kinds of cable, running thru conduit. This time I was using cable that was certified to be directly buried. It was still in conduit where it came out of the garage (because it is not certified to be encased in concrete and because I didn’t want a potential leak above the floor anyway), but then came out of the conduit below the footings level. I basically wired it according to above ground code with the required depth below the footing and bushings, etc. After burial, it will only further exceed code.
Gallery
Just some pics…
The Trench was a combination of had dug and Skid Steer dragged
The Skid Steer can’t dig like an excavator, but it can pull the dirt out of the way with the wide bucket…
The skid steer can’t dig like an excavator, but it sure can move dirt.
Another angle on the SkidSteer, because of reasons.
This is the stubbed in end of the garage septic line that had been buried before the garage floor or footings were poured.
This is the stubbed in end of the garage septic line that had been buried before the garage floor or footings were poured.
The main line is 10 ft below ground. These two side branches bring in the bedroom and garage lines.
The plumbing stack from above.
Pipe laid
This is the high end on the bedrooms side. The vertical part was for an additional cleanout. I left it off the video because the plumber didn’t like the angle of the fitting and cut this out before connecting up the way he wanted it.
My father dug most of the shortcut trench himself
Cables laid in the trench…
The boys were mainly for moral support, but still wanted to be in the picture. This picture was just in-case I needed to prove the depth to the inspector.
Another pic for the inspector, with Sherri being goofy in the background while working on the rebar.
This is quite a bit deeper than code requires.
This is the toilet rough in. We simply cut off the pipe and pushed in that fitting so we could attach the toilet.
In this segment, we mark and place the front columns and the curved I-beams that form the framework for the entry and green house sections. Most of the time-lapse footage was lost some how, but I did have some pics…
The video
Surplus Steel
I bought the columns from the surplus steel place in my area. The cost was low enough that I didn’t mind a few imperfections. No regrets and I will probably do it again. I did put tape over the holes to keep wasps from moving in.
Trouble with the Forks
When I bought the skid steer, the guy who sold it to me said he also had a beat up set of old forks that I could have for 200$. New forks cost 3 or 4 times as much, so I told him to send those with the skid steer even though I hadn’t actually seen them. At first, I just noticed that the back board was a bit damaged. After using them, I also noticed that the two forks were actually different thickness (miss-matched set) and had bent slightly differently and I was having trouble holding things level.
We didn’t worry about the back board, but my father and I fixed the “uneven” issue with some torches (and lots of patience) to heat up one of the forks so we could bend it to match the other.
But all that time, I was using the forks to lift heavy things, so I didn’t notice the 3rd issue… When you apply loads the other way (pushing down on the forks), the locking mechanism is supposed to hold them in place. However, the top ledge that holds the locking mechanism in place had been slightly stretched upward and increased the tolerance by maybe 1/4th of an inch, and that was enough for the mechanism to actually detach when the load was pushed the other way.
While setting the second I-beam, The beam got hooked on the bent back shield and wouldn’t let me lower the forks. Since this flipped the load direction, it also shifted the locking mechanism down 1/4th inch relative to the forks and they detached from that top edge.
With the load direction reversed, the forks detached from the skidsteer
Those Forks are a few hundred pounds of heavy steel, so rather than just let them fall off and possibly damage something on the way down, we strapped them to the quick attach mechanism on the skid steer so we could still lower them carefully.
The final fix was to weld 2 pieces of angle iron across the top of the quick attach mechanism to remove the gap so it won’t be unlocked by a reverse load.
Final view. There will be windows under most of those Ibeams and a Front door under the left most one. Earth covered in grass, etc. will be above.
